On music

On philosophy

A. A. Zhdanov (1896-1948) was a lifelong member of the Bolshevik
Party. For many years leader of the Party in Leningrad, he was
entrusted with the city’s defence during the war. In 1938 he was
elected to the Political Bureau of the Party’s Central Committee and
was entrusted with leadership of propaganda and agitational work. An
outstanding Marxist theoretician, he made a number of brilliant reports
on questions of literature, art, philosophy and the international
situation.

Three works translated here are among the most important
contributions defining and clarifying the new socialist attitude to art
and literature; the fourth deals with the role of Marxist philosophy.

The first, on literature, outlines the outstanding tasks in the
development of Soviet literature. This was a speech at the first
Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, where the main report was made
by Maxim Gorky. The second was occasioned by criticisms made of two
Leningrad journals for publishing inferior stories and poems – in
particular, the story Adventures of a Monkey by Mikhail
Zoshchenko, and poems by Anna Akhmatova.

The speech on music was delivered at a conference of Soviet
composers, at which the work of leading composers was under review,
following criticisms of a new opera, The Great Friendship, by
Muradeli.

The speech on philosophy was delivered at a philosophical conference
called to review G. Alexandrov’s textbook on the history of philosophy.

The translations were prepared and edited by Eleanor Fox, Stella
Jackson and Harold C. Feldt for the Society for Cultural Relations with
the U.S.S.R.

On literature

I

Speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet
Writers, 1934

Comrades, permit me to bring to the first Congress of Soviet Writers
and through the Congress to all writers in the Soviet Union at the head
of whom stands the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, ardent
Bolshevik greetings on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the U.S.S.R. and of the Council of People’s Commissars.

Comrades, your congress meets at a time when the fundamental
difficulties facing us on the path of socialist construction have
already been overcome, at a time when our country has finished laying
the foundations of a socialist economy, all of which is linked with the
victory of the policies of industrialisation and the building up of
state and collective farms.

Your congress meets at a time when the socialist way of life has
incontrovertibly and finally triumphed, thanks to the leadership of the
Communist Party, guided by Comrade Stalin, that genius and our leader
and teacher.

Moving consistently from stage to stage, from victory to victory,
from the fires of the civil war to the period of restoration and thence
to the socialist reconstruction of the whole national economy, our
Party has brought the country to victory over the capitalist elements,
which have been ousted from every sphere of the national economy.

The U.S.S.R has become an advanced industrial country and a country
with the greatest socialist agriculture in the world. The U.S.S.R. has
become a country of advanced socialist culture, a country in which our
Soviet culture is developing and growing, etched in brilliant colours.

The parasite classes have been done away with, unemployment and the
pauperism of villages are non-existent, city slums have disappeared,
because the socialist system has been victorious in our country. The
entire face of the Soviet land has changed. People’s consciousness has
radically altered. Workers and collective farmers, the builders of
socialism, have become the celebrities of our land.

The strengthening of the internal and external position of the
Soviet Union, the growth of its international importance and authority,
its significance as a shock-brigade for the world proletariat and a
powerful bulwark of the coming world proletarian revolution, are all
very closely linked with the victories of socialism in our country. At
the 17th Party Congress, Comrade Stalin made an unsurpassed and
brilliant analysis of our victories and the reasons for them, and of
our position at the present time. He laid down a programme of further
work for completing the building of a classless socialist society.

Comrade Stalin made an extensive analysis of backward sectors of our
work and of difficulties, to overcome which our Party carries on an
unceasing daily struggle, leading the many millions of the working
class and of the collective farm peasantry. It is imperative to put an
end to the backwardness of such important branches of the national
economy as rail and water transport; goods turnover and non-ferrous
metallurgy. Livestock breeding, being one of the most important
branches of our socialist agriculture, must be developed.

Comrade Stalin thoroughly exposed the root causes of our
difficulties and shortcomings. They derive from the fact that
organisational and practical work are not keeping pace with the
requirements of the Party’s political line and the demands arising from
the carrying out of the Second Five-Year Plan. That was why the 17th
Party Congress raised in all its amplitude the task of bringing our
organisational work to the level of the mighty political tasks facing
us.

Under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, the Party is organising the
masses for the struggle to destroy capitalist elements once and for
all, to eradicate the vestiges of capitalism in our economy and in
people’s minds, and to complete the technical reconstruction of our
national economy. The eradication of vestiges of capitalism in people’s
consciousness means struggle against every vestige of bourgeois
influence over the proletariat, against laxity, frivolity or idling,
against petty-bourgeois licence and individualism, against graft and
dishonesty towards social property.

We hold a trusty weapon to overcome all the difficulties in our
path. This weapon is the great and invincible teaching of Marx, Engels,
Lenin and Stalin, now being put into practice by our Party. Their great
banner is triumphant and it is to that triumph that we owe the assembly
of this first congress of Soviet writers. Had there been no such
victory there would have been no congress. Only Bolsheviks could bring
together such a congress.

The successes of Soviet literature are conditioned by the successes
of socialist construction. The growth of Soviet literature reflects the
successes and achievements of our socialist system. Our literature is
the youngest of all the literatures of all countries and peoples. At
the same time, it has the greatest idea-content and it is the most
advanced and revolutionary.

There does not exist and never has existed any literature other than
Soviet literature to organise the working people and the oppressed in a
struggle to destroy utterly any and every kind of exploitation and to
shake off the yoke of wage slavery.

There is not and never has been a literature making its basic
subject-matter the life of the working class and the peasantry and
their struggle for socialism. There does not exist in any country in
the world a literature to defend and protect the equality or rights of
the working people of all nations anti the equality of rights of women.
There is not, nor can there be in any bourgeois country, a literature
to wage consistent war on all obscurantism, mysticism, hierarchic
religious attitudes and threats of hell-fire, as our literature does.

Only Soviet literature could become and has in fact become such
an advanced, thought-imbued literature. It is one flesh and blood with
our socialist construction.

Soviet writers have already written a good number of talented books,
correctly and truthfully depicting the life of our Soviet land. We
already have several names of whom we may be justly proud. The great
body of Soviet authors is now fused with the Soviet power and the
Party, having the aid of Party guidance and the care and daily
assistance of the Central Committee and the unceasing support of
Comrade Stalin. All the contradiction between our system – that of
victorious socialism – and the dying, decaying capitalist system, can
be distinguished with the greatest clarity in the light of the
successes of our Soviet literature.

What can the bourgeois writer write or think of, where can he find
passion, if the worker in the capitalist countries is not sure of his
tomorrow, does not know whether he will have work, if the peasant does
not know whether he will be working on his bit of land or thrown on the
scrap heap by a capitalist crisis, if the working intellectual is out
of work today and does not know whether he will have work tomorrow?

What can the bourgeois author write about, what source of
inspiration can there be for him, when the world, from one day to the
next, may be plunged once more into the abyss of a new imperialist war?

The present position of bourgeois literature is such that it is
already incapable of producing great works. The decline and decay
of bourgeois literature derive from the decline and decay of the
capitalist system and are a feature and aspect characteristic of the
present condition of bourgeois culture and literature. The days
when bourgeois literature, reflecting the victories of the bourgeois
system over feudalism, was in the hey-day of capitalism capable of
creating great works, have gone, never to return. Today a degeneration
in subject matter, in talents, in authors and in heroes, is in
progress.

Mortally afraid of the proletarian revolution, fascism is wreaking
vengeance on civilisation, dragging men back to the darkest and most
barbaric periods of human history, throwing on to the bonfires and
barbarically destroying the works of some of the finest men humanity
has produced.

A riot of mysticism, religious mania and pornography is
characteristic of the decline and decay of bourgeois culture. The
“celebrities” of that bourgeois literature which has sold its pen to
capital are today thieves, detectives, prostitutes, pimps and
gangsters.

All this is characteristic of the section of literature that seeks
to conceal the decay of the bourgeois system, seeks in vain to prove
that nothing has happened, that everything is as it should be “in the
state of Denmark” and that there is as yet no decay in the capitalist
structure. The bourgeois writers who feel the state of affairs more
acutely are steeped in pessimism, uncertainty as to the morrow,
praising the dark night, and lauding pessimism as the theory and
practice of art. And it is only a small section – the most honest and
far-sighted of the writers – who are seeking to find a way out along
other paths, in other directions, linking their fate with the
proletariat and its revolutionary struggle.

The proletariat of the capitalist countries is already forging its
army of writers and artists – revolutionary writers, the
representatives of whom we are glad to be able to welcome here today at
the first Soviet Writers’ Congress. The number of revolutionary writers
in the capitalist countries is still small but it is growing and will
grow with every day’s sharpening of the class struggle, with the
growing strength of the world proletarian revolution.

We are firmly convinced that the few dozen foreign comrades we
have welcomed here constitute the kernel, the embryo, of a mighty army
of proletarian writers to be created by the world proletarian
revolution in foreign countries.

Such is the position in the capitalist countries. The opposite is
true of our country. Our Soviet writer draws the material for his work,
his subject matter and characters, his literary language and words,
from the life and experience of the people of Dnieprostroi and
Magnitostroi, from the heroic epic of the Chelyuskin
expedition, from the experience of our collective farms, from the
creative work now in full swing in the four corners of our land.

In our country the main heroes of a literary work are the active
builders of the new life – men and women workers and collective
farmers, Party and state workers, engineers, Komsomols, Pioneers. These
are the main types and heroes of our Soviet literature. Our literature
is imbued with enthusiasm and heroism. It is an optimistic literature,
not, it should be said, in any purely physical sense of “inner”
feeling. It is a fundamentally optimistic literature, since it is the
literature of the rising proletarian class, today the only progressive
and advanced class. Our Soviet literature is strong because it serves a
new cause – the cause of socialist construction.

Comrade Stalin has called our writers, “engineers of the human
soul”. What does this mean? What obligations does such an appellation
put upon you?

It means, in the first place, that you must know life to be able to
depict it truthfully in artistic creations, to depict it neither
“scholastically” nor lifelessly, nor simply as “objective reality”, but
rather as reality in its revolutionary development. The truthfulness
and historical exactitude of the artistic image must be linked with the
task of ideological transformation, of the education of the working
people in the spirit of socialism. This method in fiction and literary
criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.

Our Soviet literature is not afraid of being called tendentious, for
in the epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be any
classless, non-tendentious and “apolitical” literature.

And it seems to me that any and every Soviet writer may say to any
dull-witted bourgeois, to any philistine or to any bourgeois writers
who speak of the tendentiousness of our literature: “Yes, our Soviet
literature is tendentious and we are proud of it, for our
tendentiousness is to free the working people – and the whole of
mankind – from the yoke of capitalist slavery.”

To be an engineer of the human soul is to stand four-square on real
life. And this in turn means a break with old-style romanticism, with
the romanticism which depicted a non-existent life and non-existent
heroes, drawing the reader away from the contradictions and shackles of
life into an unrealisable and utopian world. Romanticism is not alien
to our literature, a literature standing firmly on a materialist basis,
but ours is a romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism.

We say that socialist realism is the fundamental method of Soviet
fiction and literature criticism, and this implies that revolutionary
romanticism will appear as an integral part of any literary creation,
since the whole life of our Party, of the working class and its
struggle, is a fusion of the hardest, most matter-of-fact practical
work, with the greatest heroism and the vastest perspectives. The
strength of our Party has always lain in the fact that it has united
and unites efficiency and practicality with broad vision, with an
incessant forward striving and the struggle to build a communist
society:

Soviet literature must be able to portray our heroes and to see
our tomorrow. This will not be utopian since our tomorrow is being
prepared by planned and conscious work today.

One cannot be an engineer of the human soul without skill in
writing, and it is necessary to note that the writer’s technique has
many specific characteristics. You have many weapons at your disposal.
Soviet literature has every opportunity of using all these weapons
(genres, styles, forms and methods of literary creation) in all their
variety and fullness, in seeking to make use of all the finest that has
been created in this sphere by all previous epochs. From this
standpoint, mastery of technique and critical assimilation of the
literary heritage of every epoch are tasks that must be executed if you
are to become engineers of the human soul.

Comrades, the proletariat is the sole heir of the best in the
treasure house of world literature, as in other spheres of material and
spiritual culture. The bourgeoisie has squandered the literary heritage
and we must bring it together again carefully, study it and then,
having critically assimilated it, move forward.

To be an engineer of the human soul means fighting actively for
craftsmanship in words, quality in work. Our literature is not yet
meeting the demands of our epoch. The weaknesses in our literature
reflect the fact that consciousness is lagging behind economic life, a
state of affairs from which, obviously, our writers are not exempt.
That is why unceasing work on educating themselves and improving their
ideological weapons in the spirit of socialism are the indispensable
conditions without which Soviet writers cannot change the consciousness
of their readers and thus be engineers of the human soul.

We need great skill in our creative works and in this respect the
help of Alexei Maximovich Gorky is invaluable – invaluable the help he
gives the party and the proletariat in the struggle for quality in
literature, for craftsmanship in language.

Soviet writers have therefore all the necessary conditions for
creating works worthy of our epoch, works from which contemporaries may
learn, and works for future generations to take pride in.

All the conditions for Soviet literature to produce works worthy of
the adult and mature masses have now been created. After all, it is
only our literature which is able to be so closely linked with its
readers and with the whole life of the working people as is the case in
the U.S.S.R. This present congress is particularly revealing. The
congress was not prepared by writers alone. The whole country prepared
it with them. In this preparatory work there were plainly apparent the
true sympathy with which Soviet writers are surrounded by the Party,
the workers and collective farm peasantry and also the demands the
working class and the collective farmers make of Soviet writers.

In our country alone are literature and the writer raised to such
heights.

Organise the work of your congress and the future work of the Union
of Soviet Writers, so that the work of the writers accords with the
socialist victories achieved.

Create works of great craftsmanship, of profound ideological and
artistic content,

Be the most active organisers of the remoulding of people’s
consciousness in the spirit of socialism.

Stand in the front ranks of the fighters, for a classless
socialist society!

II

Report on the Journals “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”,
1947

Mistakes of two Leningrad journals

It is clear from the Central Committee’s decision that Zvezda’s
worst mistake has been that of allowing the writings of Zoshchenko and
Akhmatova to appear in its pages. It is, I think, hardly necessary for
me to instance Zoshchenko’s “work” The Adventures of a Monkey.
You have certainly all read it and know it better than I do. The point
of this “work” of Zoshchenko’s is that in it he portrays Soviet people
as lazy, unattractive, stupid and crude. He is in no way concerned with
their labour, their efforts, their heroism, their high social and moral
qualities. He never so much as mentions these. He chooses, like the
cheap philistine he is, to scratch about in life’s basenesses and
pettinesses. This is no accident. It is intrinsic in all cheap
philistine writers, of whom Zoshchenko is one. Gorky often used to
speak of this; you will remember how, at the 1934 Congress of Soviet
Writers, he stigmatised the so-called literati who can see no
further than the soot on the kitchen range and in the boiler room.

The Adventures of a Monkey is not a thing apart from the
general run of Zoshchenko’s stories. It is merely as the most vivid
expression of all the negative qualities in his “literary work” that it
has attracted the critics’ attention. Since he returned to Leningrad
after the evacuation, he has, we know, written several things
demonstrating his inability to find anything positive whatever in the
life of Soviet people or any positive character among them. He is in
the habit of jeering at Soviet life, ways and people, as he does in The
Adventure of a Monkey, and of concealing his jeers behind a mask
of empty-headed entertainment and pointless humour.

If you take the trouble to read his Adventures of a Monkey
more closely you will find that he makes the monkey act as a supreme
judge of our social customs, a dictator of morality to Soviet people.
The monkey is depicted as an intelligent creature capable of assessing
human behaviour. The writer deliberately caricatures the life of Soviet
people as unattractive and cheap, so as to have the monkey pass the
judgment, filthy, poisonous and anti-Soviet as it is, that living in
the zoo is better than being at liberty, that you can draw your breath
more freely in a cage than among Soviet people.

Is it possible to fall morally and politically lower than this? How
can the people of Leningrad tolerate such rubbish and vulgarity in the
pages of their journals?

The Leningraders in charge of Zvezda must indeed be
lacking in vigilance if a “work” of this sort is offered to the
journal’s Soviet readers, if it is found possible to publish works
steeped in the venom of bestial enmity towards the Soviet order. Only
the scum of the literary world could write such “works”, and only the
blind, the apolitical could allow them to appear.

Zoshchenko’s story is said to have gone the rounds of Leningrad’s
variety halls. The leadership of educational work in Leningrad must
have fallen to a low level indeed for such a thing to be possible.

Zoshchenko has managed to find a niche for himself in the pages of
an important Leningrad journal and to popularise his loathsome “moral
lessons” there. And yet Zvezda is a journal purporting to
educate our young people. Is that a task to be coped with by a journal
that has taken a low un-Soviet writer like Zoshchenko to its heart? Is Zvezda’s
editorial board unaware of what he is?

It is not so long ago – early 1944, in fact – that Bolshevik
published an article sharply critical of Zoshchenko’s book Before
Sunrise,
which was written at the height of the Soviet people’s war of
liberation against the German invaders. In this book Zoshchenko turns
his low, cheap little self inside out, and delights to exhibit himself
to the public gaze; indeed, he does it with gusto, crying: See what an
oaf I am!

It would be hard to find in our literature anything more revolting
than the “lesson” Zoshchenko teaches in this book, Before Sunrise,
where he portrays himself and others as lewd and repulsive beasts with
neither shame nor conscience. Such was the “lesson” he offered Soviet
readers when our people were shedding their blood in an unprecedentedly
bitter war, when the life of the Soviet state hung by a thread, when
the Soviet people were making countless sacrifices to defeat the
Germans. Far in the rear, entrenched in Alma-Ata, Zoshchenko was doing
nothing to help. Bolshevik publicly castigated him, and
rightly, as a low slanderer having no place in Soviet literature.

But he snapped his fingers at public opinion. Less than two years
later, friend Zoshchenko struts back to Leningrad and starts making
free use of the pages of the Leningrad journals. Not only Zvezda
but Leningrad,
too, welcomed his stories. Variety concert halls were rapidly made
available. Moreover, he was allowed to occupy a leading position in the
Leningrad section of the Union of Soviet Writers and to play an active
part in the literary affairs of Leningrad.

What grounds have you for letting him roam at will through the parks
and gardens of Leningrad literature? Why have Leningrad’s active Party
workers and the Leningrad Writers’ Union allowed such shameful things
to occur?

Zoshchenko’s thoroughly rotten and corrupt social, political and
literary attitude does not result from any recent transformation. There
is nothing accidental about his latest “works”. They are simply the
continuation of his literary “legacy” dating from the twenties.

Who was he in the past? He was one of the organisers of the literary
group known as the Serapion Brothers. And when the Serapion Brothers
group was formed, what was he like socially and politically? Let me
turn to Literaturniye Zapiski (3, 1922) where the founders of
this group expounded their creed. This journal contains, among other
things, Zoshchenko’s credo,
in an article entitled “About Myself and a Few Other Things”. Quite
unashamed, he publicly exposes himself and states his political and
literary “views” with the utmost frankness. Listen to what he says:

“…It is very difficult to be a writer, on the whole. Take this
business of ideology… Writers are expected to have an ideology
nowadays… What a bore! How can I have any ‘definite ideology’, tell me,
when no Party really attracts me? From the Party members’ point of view
I am not a man of principle. What of it? For my part, I may say: I am
not a Communist, nor a Socialist-Revolutionary, nor a Monarchist, but
merely a Russian and a politically amoral one, at that.... Honest to
God, I don’t know to this day what Party, well, Guchkov... say, belongs
to. Heaven knows what party he’s in; I know he isn’t a Bolshevik, but
whether he’s a Socialist-Revolutionary or a Cadet I neither know nor
care.” And so on and so forth.

What do you make of that sort of “ideology”? Twenty-five years have
passed since Zoshchenko published this “confession” of his. Has he
changed since? Not so that you would notice it. Not only has he neither
learned anything nor changed in any way in the last two and a half
decades, but with cynical frankness he continues, on the contrary, to
remain the apostle of empty-headedness and cheapness, a literary
slum-rat, unprincipled and conscienceless. That is to say, now as then
he cares nothing for Soviet ways, now as then he has no place in Soviet
literature and opposes it.

If he has nevertheless become something approaching a literary star
in Leningrad, if his praises are sung on Leningrad’s Parnassus, we can
but marvel at the lack of principle, of strictness, of discrimination,
in the people who paved the way for him and applauded him.

Allow me to instance one more illustration of what the Serapion
Brothers, so-called, were like. In the same issue of Literaturniye
Zapiski
(3. 1922) another Serapionist, Lev Lunts, also tried to expound the
ideological basis of the harmful trend represented by the Serapion
Brothers, which is alien to the spirit of Soviet literature. Lunts
wrote:

“We gathered together at a time of great political and revolutionary
tension. ‘He who is not with us is against us’, we were told on all
hands. ‘Who are you with, Serapion Brothers’, we were asked, ‘with the
Communists or against them, for the revolution or against it?’ And so,
who are we with, Serapion Brothers? We are with the hermit Serapion.
Officialdom has ruled Russian literature too long and too painfully. We
do not want utilitarianism. We do not write for propaganda purposes.
Art is real, like life itself, and like life it exists because it must,
without purpose or meaning.”

Such was the role allotted to art by the Serapion Brothers,
depriving it of all ideological content or social significance; they
proclaimed the non-ideological nature of art, demanding art for art’s
sake, without purpose or meaning. This is nothing but a plea for
philistinism, superficiality and lack of political belief.

What conclusion does this lead to? Zoshchenko does not like Soviet
ways: so what would you advise us to do? Adapt ourselves to him? It is
not for us to change our tastes. It is not for us to alter our life and
our order to suit him. Let him change; and if he will not, let him get
out of Soviet literature, in which there can be no place for
meaningless, cheap, empty-headed works.

This was the Central Committee’s starting point in adopting its
decisions on Zvezda and Leningrad.

I will now turn to the literary “work” of Anna Akhmatova. Her works
have been appearing in the Leningrad journals recently as an example of
“increased output”. This is as surprising and unnatural as it would be
if someone were to start issuing new editions of the works of
Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav, Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, Zinaida
Hippius, Fyodor Sologub, Zinovyeva-Annibal, and so on and so forth;
that is, of all the writers whom our advanced public and literary
circles have always considered to be representatives of reactionary
obscurantism and perfidy in art and politics.

Gorky once said that the ten years from 1907 to 1917 might well be
called the most shameful, the most barren decade in the history of
Russian intellectuals; in this decade, after the 1905 Revolution, a
great many of the intellectuals spurned the revolution and slid down
into a morass of pornography and reactionary mysticism, screening their
perfidy with the “pretty” phrase: “I too have burned all I revered and
have revered what I burned.”

It was during these ten years that there appeared such perfidious
works as Ropshin’s The Pale Horse
and the writings of Vinnichenko and other deserters from the camp of
revolution to that of reaction, hastening to dethrone the lofty ideals
that the best and most progressive representatives of Russian society
were fighting for. It was then that there rose to the surface
Symbolists, Imagists and decadents of every shape and hue, disowning
the people and proclaiming the thesis of “Art for Art’s sake”,
preaching the meaninglessness of literature and screening their
ideological and moral corruption behind a pursuit of beauty of form
without content. All of them were united in their brutish fear of the
coming workers’ revolution. Suffice it to recall that one of the most
notable “theoreticians” in these reactionary literary movements was
Merezhkovsky, who called the coming workers’ revolution “the
approaching rabble” and greeted the October revolution with bestial
malice.

Anna Akhmatova is one of the representatives of this idea-less
reactionary morass in literature. She belongs to the “Acmeist” literary
group, who in their day emerged from the ranks of the Symbolists and
she is one of the standard bearers of the meaningless, empty-headed,
aristocratic-salon school of poetry, which has no place whatever in
Soviet literature. The Acmeists represented an extremely
individualistic trend in art. They preached “Art for Art’s sake”,
“Beauty for Beauty’s sake”, and had no wish to know anything about the
people and the people’s needs and interests, or about social life.

This was a bourgeois-aristocratic trend in literature, appearing at
a time when the days of the bourgeoisie and of the aristocracy were
numbered, when the poets and theoreticians of the ruling classes were
trying to hide from harsh reality in the mists and clouds of religious
mysticism, in paltry personal experiences and in absorption in their
own petty souls, The Acmeists, like the symbolists, decadents and other
representatives of the disintegrating bourgeois-aristocratic ideology,
were preachers of defeatism, pessimism and faith in a hereafter.

Akhmatova’s subject-matter is individualistic to the core. The range
of her poetry is sadly limited; it is the poetry of a spoilt
woman-aristocrat, frenziedly vacillating between boudoir and chapel.
Her main emphasis is on erotic love-themes interwoven with notes of
sadness, longing, death, mysticism, fatality. A sense of fatality
(quite comprehensible in a dying group), the dismal tones of a deathbed
hopelessness, mystical experiences shot with eroticism, make up
Akhmatova’s spiritual world; she is a left-over from the world of the
old aristocracy now irrevocably past and gone, the world of
“Catherine’s good old days”. It would be hard to say whether she is a
nun or a fallen woman; better perhaps say she is a bit of each, her
desires and her prayers intertwined.

“But I vow by the garden of angels, By the miraculous icon I vow, I vow by the child of our passion...”
– from Anno Domini, by Anna Akhmatova.

Such is Akhmatova, with her petty, narrow personal life, her paltry
experiences, and her religiously mystical eroticism.

Her poetry is far removed from the people. It is the poetry of the
ten thousand members of the elite society of the old aristocratic
Russia. whose hour has long since struck and left them with nothing to
do but sigh for “the good old days”, for the country estates of
Catherine’s time, with their avenues of ancient lime trees, their
fountains, their statues, their arches, their greenhouses,
summer-houses and crumbling coats of arms, for aristocratic St.
Petersburg, for Tsarskoye Selo, for the railway station in Pavlovsk,
and for other relics of the nobility’s culture. All of these have
vanished into the irredeemable past. The few representatives of this
culture, so foreign to the spirit of the people, who have by some
miracle lived on into our own times, can do nothing but shut themselves
up in themselves and live with chimeras. “All has been plundered,
betrayed and sold”, writes Akhmatova.

Osip Mandelstam, a prominent Acmeist, wrote this, not long before
the revolution, on the social, political and literary ideals of this
little group: “The Acmeists share their love of organism and
organisation with the physiologically perfect Middle Ages....” “The
Middle Ages, with their own peculiar way of estimating a man’s relative
weight, felt and recognised it in every individual irrespective of
merit....” “Yes, Europe once passed through a labyrinth of
filigree-fine culture, when abstract being, personal existence, wholly
unadorned, was valued as an outstanding achievement. This gave rise to
the aristocratic intimacy binding everybody, so foreign to the spirit
of ‘equality and fraternity’ of the great revolution…” “The Middle Ages
are dear to us because they had so highly developed a sense of
boundaries and dividing line....” “A noble mixture of rationality and
mysticism, and a perception of the world as a living equilibrium, make
us feel a kinship with this age and prompt us to draw strength from the
works that appeared on Romance soil about the year 1200.”

These statements of Mandelstam’s contain the Acmeists’ hopes and
ideals. “Back to the Middle Ages” was the social idea of this
aristocratic-salon group. “Back to the monkey” choruses Zoshchenko.
Incidentally, the Acmeists and the Serapion Brothers are of the same
descent. Their common ancestor was Hoffman, one of the founders of
aristocratic-salon decadence and mysticism.

Where was the need to popularise Akhmatova’s poetry all of a sudden?
What has she to do with Soviet people? What need is there to offer a
literary pulpit to all these defeatist and un-Soviet literary trends?

We know from the history of Russian literature that the reactionary
literary trends to which the Symbolists and the Acmeists belonged tried
time and time again to start a crusade against the great
revolutionary-democratic tradition of Russian literature and against
its foremost representatives, tried to deprive literature of its high
ideological and social significance and to drag it down into the morass
of meaninglessness and cheapness.

All these “fashionable” trends have been engulfed and buried with
the classes whose ideology they reflected. What, in our Soviet
literature, has remained of all these Symbolists, Acmeists, Yellow
Shirts, Jacks-o-Diamonds and Nichevoki (“Nothingers”)?
Nothing whatever, though their crusades against the great
representatives of Russian revolutionary-democratic literature,
Delinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, were
launched noisily and pretentiously and just as noisily failed.

The Acmeists proclaimed it their motto “not to improve life in any
way whatever nor to indulge in criticism of it”. Why were they against
improving life in any way whatever? Because they liked the old
bourgeois-aristocratic life, whereas the revolutionary people were
preparing to disturb this life of theirs. In November 1917 both the
ruling classes and their theoreticians and singers were pitched into
the dustbin of history.

And now, in the twenty-ninth year of the socialist revolution,
certain museum specimens reappear all of a sudden and start teaching
our young people how to live. The pages of a Leningrad journal are
thrown wide open to Akhmatova and she is given carte blanche
to poison the minds of the young people with the harmful spirit of her
poetry.

One of the issues of Leningrad contains a kind of digest
of the works written by Akhmatova between 1909 and 1944. Among the rest
of the rubbish, there is a poem she wrote during evacuation in the
Great Patriotic War. In this poem she describes her loneliness, the
solitude she has to share with a black cat, whose eyes looking at her
are like the eyes of the centuries. This is no new theme: Akhmatova
wrote about a black cat in 1909, too. This mood of solitude and
hopelessness, which is foreign to the spirit of Soviet literature, runs
through the whole of Akhmatova’s work.

What has this poetry in common with the interests of our state and
people? Nothing whatever. Akhmatova’s work is a matter of the distant
past; it is foreign to Soviet life and cannot be tolerated in the pages
of our journals. Our literature is no private enterprise designed to
please the fluctuating tastes of the literary market. We are certainly
under no obligation to find a place in our literature for tastes and
ways that have nothing in common with the moral qualities and
attributes of Soviet people. What instructive value can the works of
Akhmatova have for our young people? They can do them nothing but harm.
These works can sow nothing but gloom, low spirits, pessimism, a desire
to escape the vital problems of social life and turn away from the
broad highway of social life and activity into a narrow little world of
personal experiences. How can the upbringing of our young people be
entrusted to her? Yet her poems were readily printed, sometimes in Zvezda
and sometimes in Leningrad, and were published in volume
form. This was a serious political error.

It is only natural, in view of all this, that the works of other
writers, who were also beginning to adopt an empty-headed and defeatist
tone, should have started to appear in the Leningrad journals. I am
thinking of works such as those of Sadofyev and Komissarova. In some of
their poems they imitate Akhmatova, cultivating the mood of
despondency, boredom and loneliness so dear to her.

Needless to say, such moods, or the extolling of them, can exert
only a negative influence on our young people and are bound to poison
their minds with a vicious spirit of empty-headedness, despondency and
lack of political consciousness.

What would have happened if we had brought our young people up in a
spirit of despondency and of disbelief in our cause? We should not have
won the Great Patriotic War. It is precisely because the Soviet State,
and our Party, with the help of Soviet literature, had brought our
young people up in a spirit of optimism and with confidence in their
own strength, that we were able to surmount the tremendous difficulties
that faced us in the building of socialism and in defeating the Germans
and the Japanese.

What does this mean? It means that by printing in its pages cheap
and reactionary works devoid of proper ideas, side by side with good
works of rich content and cheerful tone, Zvezda became a
journal having no clear policy, a journal helping our enemies to
corrupt our young people. The strength of our journals has always lain
in their optimistic revolutionary trend, not in eclecticism,
empty-headedness and lack of political understanding. Zvezda
gave its full sanction to propaganda in favour of doing nothing.

To make matters worse, Zoshchenko seems to have acquired so much
power in the Leningrad writers’ organisation that he even used to shout
down those who disagreed with him and threaten to lampoon his critics
in one of his forthcoming works. He became a sort of literary dictator
surrounded by a group of admirers singing his praises.

Well may one ask, on what grounds? Why did you allow such an
unnatural and reactionary thing as this to occur?

No wonder Leningrad’s literary journals started giving space to
cheap modern bourgeois literature from the West. Some of our men of
letters began looking on themselves as not the teachers but the pupils
of petty-bourgeois writers, and began to adopt an obsequious and
awestruck attitude towards foreign literature. Is such obsequiousness
becoming in us Soviet patriots who have built up the Soviet order,
which towers higher a hundredfold, and is better a hundredfold, than
any bourgeois order? Is obsequiousness towards the cheap and philistine
bourgeois literature of the West becoming in our advanced Soviet
literature, the most revolutionary in the world?

Another serious failing in the work of our writers is their ignoring
of modern Soviet subjects, which betrays on the one hand a one-sided
interest in historical subjects and on the other an attempt to write on
meaningless, purely amusing subjects. To justify their failure to keep
pace with great modern Soviet themes, some writers maintain that the
time has come to give the people meaningless and “entertaining”
literature, to stop bothering about literature’s ideological content.

This conception of our people, of their interests and requirements,
is entirely wrong. Our people expect Soviet writers to understand and
integrate the vast experience they gained in the Great Patriotic War,
to portray and integrate the heroism with which they are now working to
rehabilitate the country’s national economy.

A few words on the journal Leningrad: Zoshchenko’s
position is even stronger here than in Zvezda, as is
Akhmatova’s too. Both of them have become active powers in both
journals. Thus Leningrad
is responsible for having put its pages at the disposal of such cheap
writers as Zoshchenko and such salon poetesses as Akhmatova.

The journal Leningrad has, however, made other mistakes
also.

For instance, take the parody of Evgeny Onegin written by
one Khazin. This piece is called The Return of Onegin. It is
said to be frequently recited on the variety concert platforms of
Leningrad.

It is hard to understand why the people of Leningrad allow their
city to be vilified from a public platform in such a way as Khazin
vilifies it. The purpose of this “satire” is not simple ridicule of the
things that happen to Onegin on finding himself in modern Leningrad.
The point is that Khazin essays to compare our modern Leningrad with
the St. Petersburg of Pushkin’s day, and for the worse. Read just a few
lines of this, “parody” attentively. Nothing in our modern Leningrad
pleases the author. Sneering in malice and derision, he slanders
Leningrad and Soviet people. In his opinion, Onegin’s day was a golden
age. Everything is different now: a housing department has appeared,
and ration cards and permits. Girls, those ethereal creatures so much
admired of Onegin, now regulate the traffic and repair the Leningrad
houses and so on and so forth. Let me quote just one passage from this
“parody”:

Our poor dear Evgeny
Boarded a tram.
Never had his benighted age known
Such a means of transportation.
But fate was kind to Evgeny;
He escaped with only a foot crushed,
And only once, when someone jabbed him
In the stomach, was he called an idiot.
Remembering ancient customs,
He resolved to seek satisfaction in a duel:
He felt in his pocket, but
Someone had taken his gloves,
A frustration that reduced
Onegin to silence and docility.

That is what Leningrad was like before, and what it has turned into:
a wretched, uncouth, coarse city; and that is the aspect it presented
to poor dear Onegin. It is in this vulgar way that Khazin describes
Leningrad and its people.

The idea behind this slanderous parody is harmful, vicious and
false.

How could the editorial board of Leningrad have accepted
this malicious slander on Leningrad and its magnificent people? How
could Khazin have been allowed to appear if the pages of the Leningrad
journals?

Take another work, a parody on a parody by Nekrasov, so written as
to be a direct insult to the memory of the great poet and public figure
Nekrasov, an insult that ought to arouse the indignation of every
educated person. Yet Leningrad’s editorial board did not
hesitate to print this sordid concoction in its columns.

What else do we find in Leningrad? A foreign anecdote,
dull and shallow, apparently lifted from hackneyed anecdote-books
dating from the late nineteenth century. Is there nothing else for Leningrad
to fill its pages with? Is there really nothing to write about in Leningrad?
What about such a subject as the rehabilitation of the city? Wonderful
work is being done in Leningrad; the city is healing the wounds
inflicted during the siege; the people of Leningrad are imbued with the
enthusiasm and emotion of post-war rehabilitation. Has anything on this
appeared in Leningrad? Will the people of the city ever live
to see the day when their feats of labour are reflected in the pages of
this journal?

Further, let us take the subject of Soviet woman. Is it permissible
to cultivate in Soviet readers the disgraceful views on the role and
mission of women that are typical of Akhmatova, and not to give a
really truthful concept of modern Soviet woman in general and the
heroic girls and women of Leningrad in particular, who unflinchingly
shouldered the heavy burden of the war years and are now
self-sacrificingly working to carry out the difficult tasks presented
by the rehabilitation of the city’s economic life?

The situation in the Leningrad section of the Union of Soviet
Writers is obviously such that the supply of good work is now
insufficient to fill two literary journals. The Central Committee of
the Party has therefore decided to cease publication of Leningrad,
so as to concentrate all the best literary forces in Zvezda.
This does not mean that Leningrad will not, in suitable circumstances,
have a second or even a third journal. The question will be settled by
the supply of notable literary works. Should so many appear that there
is no room for them in one journal, a second and even a third may be
started; it all depends on the intellectual and artistic quality of the
works produced by our Leningrad writers.

Such are the grave errors and failings laid bare and detailed in the
resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on the work
of Zvezda and Leningrad.

Leninism and literature

What is the cause of these errors and failings?

It is that the editors of the said journals, our Soviet men of
letters, and the leaders of our ideological front in Leningrad, have
forgotten some of the principal tenets of Leninism as regards
literature. Many writers, and many of those working as responsible
editors, or holding important posts in the Writers’ Union, consider
politics to be the business of the Government or of the Central
Committee. When it comes to men of letters, engaging in politics is no
business of theirs. If a man has done a good, artistic, fine piece of
writing, his work should be published even though it contains vicious
elements liable to confuse and poison the minds of our young people.

We demand that our comrades, both practicing writers and those in
positions of literary leadership, should be guided by that without
which the Soviet order cannot live, that is to say, by politics, so
that our young people may be brought up not in the spirit of do-nothing
and don’t care, but in an optimistic revolutionary spirit.

We know that Leninism embodies all the finest traditions of the
Russian nineteenth-century revolutionary democrats and that our Soviet
culture derives from and is nourished by the critically assimilated
cultural heritage of the past.

Through the lips of Lenin and Stalin our Party has repeatedly
recognised the tremendous significance in the field of literature of
the great Russian revolutionary democratic writers and critics
Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Plekhanov.
From Belinsky onward, all the best representatives of the revolutionary
democratic Russian intellectuals have denounced “pure art” and “art for
art’s sake”, and have been the spokesmen of art for the people,
demanding that art should have a worthy educational and social
significance.

Art cannot cut itself off from the fate of the people. Remember
Belinsky’s famous Letter to Gogol,
in which the great critic, with all his native passion, castigated
Gogol for his attempt to betray the cause of the people and go over to
the side of the Tsar. Lenin called this letter one of the finest works
of the uncensored democratic press, one that has preserved its
tremendous literary significance to this day.

Remember Dobrolyubov’s articles, in which the social significance of
literature is so powerfully shown. The whole of our Russian
revolutionary democratic journalism is imbued with a deadly hatred of
the Tsarist order and with the noble aspiration to fight for the
people’s fundamental interests, their enlightenment, their culture,
their liberation from the fetters of the Tsarist regime. A militant art
fighting for the people’s finest ideals, that is how the great
representatives of Russian literature envisaged art and literature.

Chernyshevsky, who comes nearest of all the utopian socialists to
scientific socialism and whose works were, as Lenin pointed out,
“indicative of the spirit of the class struggle”, taught us that the
task of art was, besides affording a knowledge of life, to teach people
how to assess correctly varying social phenomena. Dobrolyubov, his
companion-in-arms and closest friend, remarked that “it is not life
that follows literary standards, but literature that adapts itself to
the trends of life”, and strongly supported the principles of realism,
and the national clement, in literature, on the grounds that the basis
of art is life, that life is the source of creative achievement and
that art plays an active part in social life and in shaping social
consciousness. Literature, according to Dobrolyubov, should serve
society, should give the people answers to the most urgent problems of
the day, should keep abreast of the ideas of its epoch.

Marxist literary criticism, which carries on the great traditions of
Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, has always supported realistic
art with a social stand. Plekhanov did a great deal to show up the
idealistic and unscientific concept of art and literature and to defend
the basic tenets of our great Russian revolutionary democrats, who
taught us to regard literature as a means of serving the people.

Lenin was the first to state clearly what attitude towards art and
literature advanced social thought should take. Let me remind you of
the well-known article, Party Organisation and Party Literature,
which he wrote at the end of 1905, and in which he demonstrated with
characteristic forcefulness that literature cannot but have a partisan
adherence and that it must form an important part of the general
proletarian cause. All the principles on which the development of our
Soviet literature is based are to be found in this article.

“Literature must become partisan literature”, wrote Lenin. “To
offset bourgeois customs, to offset the commercial bourgeois press, to
offset bourgeois literary careerism and self-seeking, to offset
‘gentlemanly anarchism’ and profit-seeking, the socialist proletariat
must put forward the principle of partisan literature, must
develop this principle and carry it out in the completest and most
integral form.

“What is this principle of partisan literature? It is not merely
that literature cannot, to the socialist proletariat, be a means of
profit to individuals or groups; all in all, literature cannot be an
individual matter divorced from the general proletarian cause. Down
with the writers who think themselves supermen! Down with non-partisan
writers! Literature must become part and parcel of the
general proletarian cause….”

And further, from the same article: “It is not possible” to live in
society and remain free of it. The freedom of the bourgeois writer,
artist or actor is merely a masked dependence (hypocritically masked
perhaps) on the money-bags, on bribes, on allowances.”

Leninism starts from the premise that our literature cannot be
apolitical, cannot be “art for art’s sake”, but is called upon to play
an important and leading part in social life. Hence derives the
Leninist principle of partisanship in literature, one of Lenin’s most
important contributions to the study of literature.

It follows that the finest aspect of Soviet literature is its
carrying on of the best traditions of nineteenth-century Russian
literature, traditions established by our great revolutionary democrats
Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin, continued
by Plekhanov and scientifically elaborated and substantiated by Lenin
and Stalin.

Nekrasov declared his poetry to be inspired by “the Muse of sorrow
and vengeance”. Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov regarded literature as
sacred service to the people. Under the tsarist system, the finest
representatives among the democratic Russian intellectuals perished for
these high and noble ideas, or willingly risked sentences of exile and
hard labour.

How can these glorious traditions be forgotten? How can we pass them
over, how can we let the Akhmatovas and the Zoshchenkos disseminate the
reactionary catchword “art for art’s sake”, how can we let them, behind
their mask of impartiality, impose ideas on us that are alien to the
spirit of the Soviet people?

Leninism recognises the tremendous significance of our literature as
a means of reforming society. Were our Soviet literature to allow any
falling off in its tremendous educational role, the result would be
retrogression, a return “to the Stone Age”.

Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of the human soul.
This definition has a profound meaning. It speaks of the enormous
educational responsibility Soviet writers bear, responsibility for the
training of Soviet youth, responsibility for seeing to it that bad
literary work is not tolerated.

There are people who find it strange that the Central Committee
should have taken such stringent measures as regards literature. It is
not what we are accustomed to. If mistakes have been allowed to occur
in industrial production, or if the production programme for consumer
goods has not been carried out, or if the supply of timber falls behind
schedule, then it is considered natural for the people responsible to
be publicly reprimanded. But if mistakes have been allowed to occur as
regards the proper influencing of human souls, as regards the
upbringing of the young, then such mistakes may be tolerated. And yet,
is not this a bitterer pill to swallow than the non-fulfilment of a
production programme or the failure to carry out a production task? The
purpose of the Central Committee’s resolution is to bring the
ideological front into line with all the other sectors of our work.

On the ideological front, serious gaps and failings have recently
become apparent. Suffice it to remind you of the backwardness of our
cinematic art, and of the way our theatre repertoires have got
cluttered up with poor dramatic works, not to mention what has been
going on in Zvezda and Leningrad. The Central
Committee has been compelled to interfere and firmly to set matters
right. It has no right to deal gently with those who forget their
duties with regard to the people, to the upbringing of our young
people. If we wish to draw our members’ attention to questions relating
to ideological work and to set matters right in this field, to
establish a clear line in this work, then we must criticise the
mistakes and failings in ideological work severely, as befits Soviet
people, as befit Bolsheviks. Only then shall we be able to set matters
right.

There are men of letters who reason thus: since during the war, when
few books were printed, the people were hungry for reading matter, the
reader will now swallow anything, even though the flavour be a trifle
tainted. This is not in fact true, and we cannot put up with any old
literature that may be palmed off on us by undiscriminating authors,
editors and publishers. From Soviet writers the Soviet people expect
reliable ideological armament, spiritual food to further the fulfilment
of construction and rehabilitation plans and to promote the development
of our country’s national economy. The Soviet people desire the
satisfaction of their cultural and ideological needs, and make great
demands on men of letters.

During the war force of circumstances prevented us from satisfying
these vital needs. The people want to understand current events. Their
cultural and intellectual level has risen. They are often dissatisfied
with the quality of the works of art and literature appearing in our
country. Certain literary workers on the ideological front have not
understood this and are unwilling to do so.

The tastes and demands of our people have risen to a very high
level, and anyone who cannot or will not rise to this level is going to
be left behind. The mission of literature is not merely to keep abreast
of the people’s demands but to be always in the vanguard. It is
essential that literature should develop the people’s tastes, raise
their demands higher and higher still, enrich them with new ideas and
lead them forward. Anyone who cannot keep pace with the people, satisfy
their growing demands and cope with the task of developing Soviet
culture, will inevitably find himself no longer in demand.

The lack of ideological principles shown by leading workers on Zvezda
and Leningrad
has led to a second serious mistake. Certain of our leading workers
have, in their relations with various authors, set personal interests,
the interests of friendship, above those of the political education of
the Soviet people or these authors’ political tendencies. It is said
that many ideologically harmful and from a literary point of view weak
productions are allowed to be published because the editor does not
like to hurt the author’s feelings. In the eyes of such workers it is
better to sacrifice the interests of the people and of the state than
to hurt some author’s feelings. This is an entirely wrong and
politically dangerous principle. It is like swopping a million roubles
for a kopeck.

The Central Committee of the Party points out in its resolution the
grave danger in substituting for relations based on principle those
based on personal friendship. The relations of personal friendship
regardless of principle prevailing among certain of our men of letters
have played a profoundly negative part, led to a falling off in the
ideological level of many literary works and made it easier for this
field to be entered by persons foreign to the spirit of Soviet
literature. The absence of any criticism on the part of the leaders of
the Leningrad ideological front or of the editors of the Leningrad
journals has done a great deal of harm; the substitution of relations
of friendship for those based on principle has been made at the expense
of the people’s interests.

Comrade Stalin teaches us that if we wish to conserve our human
resources, to guide and teach the people, we must not be afraid of
hurting the feelings of single individuals or fear bold, frank,
objective criticism founded on principle. Any organisation, literary or
other, is liable to degenerate without criticism, any ailment is liable
to be driven deeper in and become harder to cope with. Only bold frank
criticism can help our people and overcome any failings in their work.
Where criticism is lacking, stagnation and inertia set in, leaving no
room for progress.

Comrade Stalin has repeatedly pointed out that one of the most
important conditions for our development is for every Soviet citizen to
sum up the results of his work every day, to assess himself fearlessly,
to analyse his work bravely, and to criticise his own mistakes and
failings, pondering how to achieve better results and constantly
striving for self-improvement. This applies just as much to men of
letters as to any other workers. The man who is afraid of any criticism
of his work is a despicable coward deserving no respect from the
people.

An uncritical attitude, and the substitution of relations of
personal friendship for those based on principle, are very prevalent on
the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers. The Board, and its chairman
Comrade Tikhonov in particular, are to blame for the bad state of
affairs revealed in Zvezda and Leningrad, in that
they not only made no attempt to prevent the harmful influence of
Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and other un-Soviet writers penetrating into
Soviet literature, but even readily permitted styles and tendencies
alien to the spirit of Soviet literature to find a place in our
journals.

Another factor contributing to the failings of the Leningrad
journals was the state of irresponsibility that developed among the
editors of these journals, the situation being such that no one knew
who had the overall responsibility for the journal or for its various
departments, so that any sort of order, even the most rudimentary, was
impossible. The Central Committee has, therefore, in its resolution
appointed to Zvezda an editor-in-chief, who is to be held
responsible for the journal’s policy and for the ideological level and
literary quality of its contents.

Disorder and anarchy are no more to be tolerated in the issuing of
literary publications than in any other enterprise. A clear-cut
responsibility for the journal’s policy and contents must be
established.

You must restore the glorious traditions of Leningrad’s literature
and ideological front. It is a sad and painful thing to have to admit
that the Leningrad journals, which had always sponsored the most
advanced ideas, have come to harbour empty-headedness and cheapness.
The honour of Leningrad as a leading ideological and cultural centre
must be restored. We must remember that Leningrad was the cradle of the
Bolshevik Leninist organisations. It was here that Lenin and Stalin
laid the foundations of the Bolshevik Party, the Bolshevik world
outlook and Bolshevik culture.

It is a point of honour for Leningrad writers and Party members to
restore and carry further these glorious traditions. It is the task of
the Leningrad workers on the ideological front, and of the writers
above all, to drive empty-headedness and cheapness out of Leningrad
literature, to raise aloft the banner of Soviet literature, to seize
every opportunity for ideological and literary development, not to
leave up-to-date themes untreated, to keep pace with the people’s
demands, to encourage in every possible way the bold criticism of their
own failings, criticism containing no element of toadying and not based
on friendships and group-loyalties – a genuine, bold, independent,
ideological, Bolshevik criticism.

By now it should be clear to you what a serious oversight the
Leningrad City Committee of the Party, and particularly its propaganda
department and propaganda secretary Comrade Shirokov (who was put in
charge of ideological work and bears the main responsibility for the
failure of these journals), have been guilty of.

The Leningrad Committee of the Party committed a grave political
error when it passed its resolution at the end of June on Zvezda’s
new
editorial board, in which Zoshchenko was included. Political blindness
is the only possible explanation of the fact that Comrades Kapustin
(Secretary of the City Committee of the Party) and Shirokov (the City
Committee’s propaganda secretary) should have agreed to such an
erroneous decision. All these mistakes must, I repeat, be set right as
quickly and firmly as possible, to enable Leningrad to resume its
participation in the ideological life of our Party.

We all love Leningrad; we all love our Leningrad Party organisation
as being one of our Party’s leading detachments. Literary adventurers
of all sorts who would like to make use of Leningrad for their own ends
must find no refuge here. Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and the like have no
fondness for Soviet Leningrad. It is other social and political ways
and another ideology that they would like to see entrenched here. The
visions dazzling their eyes are those of old St. Petersburg, with the
Bronze Horseman as its symbol. We, on the contrary, love Soviet
Leningrad, Leningrad as the foremost centre of Soviet culture. Our
ancestors are the glorious band of great revolutionary and democratic
figures who came from Leningrad and whose direct descendants we are.
Modern Leningrad’s glorious traditions are a continuation of those
great revolutionary-democratic traditions, which we would not exchange
for anything else in the world.

Let the Leningrad Party members analyse their mistakes boldly, with
no backward glances, no taking it easy so as to straighten things out
in the best and quickest way possible and to carry our ideological work
forward. The Leningrad Bolsheviks must once more take their place in
the ranks of the initiators, of the leaders in the shaping of Soviet
ideology and Soviet social consciousness.

How could the Leningrad City Committee of the Party have permitted
such a situation to arise on the ideological front? It had evidently
become so engrossed in day-to-day practical work on the rehabilitation
of the city and the development of its industry that it forgot the
importance of ideological and educational work.

This forgetfulness has cost the Leningrad organisation dear.
Ideological work must not be forgotten. Our people’s spiritual wealth
is no less important than their material wealth. We cannot live
blindly, taking no thought for the morrow, either in the field of
material production or in the ideological field. To such an extent have
our Soviet people developed that they are not going to swallow
whatsoever spiritual food may be dumped on them. Such workers in art
and culture as do not change and cannot satisfy the people’s growing
needs may forfeit the people’s confidence before long.

Our Soviet literature lives and must live in the interests of our
country and of our people alone. Literature is a concern near and dear
to the people. So the people consider our every success, every
important work of literature, as a victory of their own. Every
successful work may therefore be compared with a battle won, or with a
great victory on the economic front. And conversely, every failure of
Soviet literature hurts and wounds the people, the Party and the state
profoundly. This is what the Central Committee was thinking of in
passing its resolution, for the Central Committee watches over the
interests of the people and of their literature, and is very greatly
concerned about the present state of affairs among Leningrad writers.

People who have not taken up any ideological stand would like to cut
away the foundations from under the Leningrad detachment of literary
workers, demolish their work’s ideological aspect and deprive the
Leningrad writers’ work of its significance as a means of social
reform. But the Central Committee is confident that Leningrad’s men of
letters will nevertheless find in themselves the strength to put a stop
to any attempts to divert Leningrad’s literature detachment and
journals into a groove of empty-headedness and lack of principle and
political consciousness. You have been set in the foremost line of the
ideological front, you are facing tremendous and internationally
significant tasks; and this should intensify every genuine Soviet
writer’s sense of responsibility to his people, his state and his
Party, and his sense of the importance of the duty he is carrying out.

Whether our successes are won within our own country or in the
international arena, the bourgeois world does not like them.

As a result of the Second World War the position of socialism has
been strengthened. The question of socialism has been put down on the
agenda of many countries in Europe. This displeases the imperialists of
every hue: they fear socialism and our socialist country, an example to
the whole of progressive mankind. The imperialists and their
ideological henchmen, writers, journalists, politicians and diplomats,
are trying to slander our country in every way open to them, to put it
in a false light, to vilify socialism. The task of Soviet literature in
these conditions is not only to return blow for blow to all this vile
slander and all these attacks on our Soviet culture and on socialism,
but also to make a frontal attack on degenerating and decaying
bourgeois culture.

However fine may be the external appearance of the work of the
fashionable modern bourgeois writers in America and Western Europe, and
of their film directors and theatrical producers, they can neither save
nor better their bourgeois culture, for its moral basis is rotten and
decaying. It has been placed at the service of capitalist private
ownership, of the selfish and egocentric interests of the top layer of
bourgeois society. A swarm of bourgeois writers, film directors and
theatrical producers are trying to draw the attention of the
progressive strata of society away from the acute problems of social
and political struggle and to divert it into a groove of cheap
meaningless art and literature, treating of gangsters and show-girls
and glorifying the adulterer and the adventures of crooks and gamblers.

Is it fitting for us Soviet patriots, the representatives of
advanced Soviet culture, to play the part of admirers or disciples of
bourgeois culture? Our literature, reflecting an order on a higher
level than any bourgeois-democratic order and a culture manifoldly
superior to bourgeois culture, has, it goes without saying, the right
to teach the new universal morals to others.

Where is another such people or country as ours to be found? Where
are such splendid human qualities to be found as our Soviet people
displayed in the Great Patriotic War and are displaying every day in
the labour of converting our economy to peaceful development and
material and cultural rehabilitation? Our people are climbing higher
and higher every day. No longer are we the Russians we were before
1917; no longer is our Russia the same, no longer is our character the
same. We have changed and grown along with the great changes that have
transfigured our country from its very foundations.

Showing these great new qualities of the Soviet people, not only
showing our people as they are today, but glancing into their future
and helping to light up the way ahead, is the task of every
conscientious Soviet writer. A writer cannot tag along in the wake of
events; it is for him to march in the foremost ranks of the people and
point out to them the path of their development. He must educate the
people and arm them ideologically, guiding himself by the method of
socialist realism, studying our life attentively and conscientiously
and trying to gain a deeper understanding of the processes of our
development.

At the same time as we select Soviet man’s finest feelings and
qualities and reveal his future to him, we must show our people what
they should not be like and castigate the survivals from yesterday that
are hindering the Soviet people’s progress. Soviet writers must help
the people, the state and the Party to educate our young people to be
optimistic, to have confidence in their own strength and to fear no
difficulties.

Hard as bourgeois politicians and writers may strive to conceal the
truth of the achievements of the Soviet order and Soviet culture, hard
as they may strive to erect an iron curtain to keep the truth about the
Soviet Union from penetrating abroad, hard as they may strive to
belittle the genuine growth and scope of Soviet culture, all their
efforts are foredoomed to failure. We know our culture’s strength and
advantages very well. Suffice it to recall the great success of our
cultural delegations abroad, of our physical culture parades and so on.
It is not for us to kowtow to all things foreign or to stand passively
on the defensive.

If in their heyday the feudal order and then the bourgeoisie were
able to create art and literature asserting the establishment of the
new order and singing its praises, then we who form a new socialist
order embodying all that is best in the history of civilisation and
culture are yet fitter to create the most advanced literature in the
world, far surpassing the finest literary examples of former times.

What is it that the Central Committee requests and wishes?

The Central Committee of the Party wishes the Leningrad Party
members and writers to understand clearly that the time has come for us
to raise our ideological work to a high level. The young Soviet
generation will be called upon to consolidate the strength and power of
the socialist Soviet order, to make full use of the motive forces of
Soviet society to promote our material and cultural progress. To carry
out these great tasks, the young generation must be brought up to be
steadfast and cheerful, not to balk at difficulties but to meet and
know how to surmount them. Our people must be educated people of high
ideals, tastes and moral and cultural demands. It is necessary to this
end that our literature, our journals, should not hold aloof from the
tasks of the day but should help the Party and the people to educate
our young people in the spirit of supreme devotion to the Soviet order
and service in the interests of the people.

Soviet writers, and all our ideological workers, are now standing in
the foremost fighting line; for our tasks on the ideological front, and
those of literature above all, have not been removed but, on the
contrary, are growing more important in conditions of peaceful
development.

It is not a removal of literature from contemporary problems that
the people, the state and the Party want, but the active incursion of
literature into every aspect of Soviet life. Bolsheviks set a high
value on literature and have a clear perception of its great historical
mission of reinforcing the people’s moral and political unity,
educating them and consolidating their ranks. The Central Committee
wishes us to feed the human spirit abundantly, regarding the attainment
of cultural wealth as a chief task of socialism.

The Central Committee of the Party feels sure the Leningrad
detachment of Soviet literature is morally and politically sound and
will quickly set its mistakes right and take its due place in the ranks
of Soviet literature.

The Central Committee feels sure the failings in the work of
Leningrad writers will be overcome and the ideological work of the
Leningrad Party organisation soon raised to the level now required in
the interests of the Party, the people and the state.

On music

Concluding Speech at a Conference of Soviet Music
Workers, 1948

Two trends in music

Comrades, allow me first of all to make some remarks about the
character of the discussion which has developed here.

A general appraisal of the situation in music shows that matters are
unsatisfactory. It is true that various shades of opinion became
apparent during discussion. Some speakers said that the weakness lay in
organisational matters and pointed out the poor state of affairs in
criticism and self criticism, and the incorrect methods of leadership
in music matters, especially in the Union of Composers. Others, while
endorsing criticism of organisation, pointed also to weaknesses in the
ideological direction of Soviet music. Still others tried to minimise
the acuteness of the situation or attempted to remain silent on
unpleasant questions. But however varied the details, the general tone
of the discussion shows that things are unsatisfactory.

I do not wish to bring “dissonance” or “atonality” into this
appraisal, although atonality is now the fashion. I do not wish to deny
the achievements of Soviet music. They exist, of course; but it must be
admitted that our achievements in music are altogether insignificant by
comparison with achievements in other spheres. Take literature, for
example. Some of the big journals are experiencing real difficulties in
using all the material in their editorial files which is well worth
publishing. No such “output” can be boasted of in music. We note
progress in films and plays too, but nothing in music.

Music has got left behind – that is the general tone of the
contributions to the discussion.

It is clear that things are not normal either in the Union of
Composers or in the Committee for Art Affairs. The Committee has not
been mentioned much and has been insufficiently criticised. At any
rate, more was said about the Union and criticism of it was sharper.
Yet the role which the Committee played was a sorry one. Behind the
pretence of standing wholeheartedly for the realist trend in music it
has in every way abetted the formalist trend. By putting the
representatives of the formalist trend on a pedestal it has greatly
contributed to the disorganisation and ideological confusion among the
ranks of our composers. Being, moreover, ignorant and incompetent in
music matters the Committee just drifted along with the formalist sect
of composers.

The Organisational Committee of the Union of Composers has been
compared both to a monastery and to a G.H.Q. without an army. There is
no need to dispute either comparison. If the destiny of Soviet music is
to be in the privileged hands of a select circle of leading composers
and critics – critics chosen for their servility and the atmosphere of
adulation with which they surround the composers; if there is a lack of
creative discussion in the Union and a stale, stuffy atmosphere which
segregates the composers into top-grade and second-rate; and if the
fashion at Union conferences is either respectful silence or awe-struck
praise of the chosen few, then it is clear that the situation on the
musical Olympus is indeed alarming.

The harmful trend in criticism and the absence of discussions in the
Union must be gone into. Lack of creative discussions, criticism and
self-criticism means that there is no advance, and that the sources of
development are drying up and stagnation is setting in.

It is no accident that people taking part for the first time in a
conference on questions of music are astonished at the presence of such
irreconcilable contradictions within the Union of Composers, with its
conservative organisational system and the allegedly ultra-progressive
views of its present leadership in the creative sphere. We know that
the Union leadership has inscribed upon its banner such promising
slogans as an appeal for innovation and for the renunciation of archaic
traditions, and a call to struggle against “epigonism”* and so on.

*
Epigonism, from epigone, an inferior follower or imitator.

It is curious, however, that the every people who wish to appear the
extreme radicals and even arch-revolutionaries in their work and who
aspire to the role of overthrowers of antiquated criteria – these same
people, in so far as they participate in the activity of the Union of
Composers, prove to be extremely backward and recalcitrant when it
comes to introducing something new or making changes; they are
conservative in their methods of work and leadership and frequently and
willingly bow to bad traditions in organisational questions. The reason
for this is not far to seek. When pompous phraseology about an alleged
new trend in Soviet music is combined with by no means progressive
action, then that fact alone is enough to cause legitimate doubt as to
the progressive character of the ideological and creative tendencies
resulting from such reactionary methods.

All of you realise very well that the organisational aspect of any
matter is of great importance. It is clear that a serious
spring-cleaning is needed, a fresh wind to purify the air in the
composers’ and musicians’ organisation, so that a normal atmosphere may
be established for the development of creative work.

The fundamental problem is nevertheless not that of organisation –
important as it is – but that of the trend of Soviet music. The
discussion which has developed here tends to blur that problem. We must
bring clarity into the question of the development of music, just as
you are aiming at clarity in musical phrasing. The discussion has
definitely brought out in relief two trends in music, and although some
comrades tried not to call a spade a spade and the game is being played
only partly in the open, it is clear nevertheless that a struggle
between the trends is taking place, and that attempts are being made to
substitute one for another.

Moreover, some of the comrades have asserted that there is no need
to raise the question of a struggle between trends since there has been
no qualitative change, and that we have here merely a development of
the classical school in Soviet conditions. They said that the
principles of classical music are undergoing no revision and that there
is consequently nothing to argue or make a fuss about. The entire
problem is being reduced by them to a matter of individuals mending
their ways, of isolated cases of enthusiasm for technique, of
naturalist lapses here and there, and so on.

The fact that such an evasion of the issue is taking place calls for
a closer examination of this struggle between two trends, since it is,
of course, not only a case of the roof of the Conservatoire leaking and
needing repair, as Comrade Shebalin has put it so aptly. That would be
a matter which could be quickly rectified. It is a case of a far larger
crack having appeared in the foundations of Soviet music.

All the speakers have shown that the leading part in the creative
activities of the Union of Composers is being played at present by a
definite group. The names of the following comrades have been
mentioned: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Khachaturyan, Popov,
Kabalevsky and Shebalin. Is there any other name you would like to add?

Voice: Shaporin.

Zhdanov: When mention is made of any leading group holding the
reins, those are the names most frequently cited. Let us consider these
comrades, who are also the leading figures of the formalist trend in
music, a trend which is fundamentally wrong.

The comrades in question have contributed to the discussion and have
stated that they, too, are dissatisfied with the lack of criticism in
the Union of Composers, with the fact that they are being overpraised,
that they feel a certain loss of contact with the main body of
composers and with concert audiences. It was hardly necessary, however,
to wait for the production of a not very successful – or not at all
successful – opera, before stating such truths. These admissions could
have been made much earlier, but the crux of the matter is that the
regime or the formalist sect in the musical organisations has not been
entirely unpleasant, to put it mildly, for the leading group of our
composers. It has required a discussion in the Central Committee of the
Party for the comrades to discover the fact that this regime has its
negative side. However that may be, before the conference not one of
them thought of changing the state of affairs in the Union of
Composers.

It has been said here that the time has come for radical changes.
One cannot but agree. Inasmuch as the dominating positions in Soviet
music are held by the comrades I have named, and inasmuch as any
attempts to criticise them would have brought about an explosion and an
immediate rallying against such criticism, in Comrade Zakharov’s words,
the conclusion must be drawn that the “cosy” atmosphere of stagnation
and personal relations which they now wish to condemn as undesirable
was in fact created by them.

Some leading comrades of the Union of Composers have asserted here
that there is no oligarchy in the Union. But then the question arises:
Why do they cling to the leading positions in the Union? Do they like
power for its own sake? Have they developed a sort of administrative
itch, so that they merely want to rule a little, like Vladimir Galitsky
in Prince Igor? Or has this domination been established in
the interests of a definite trend? I think that the first conjecture
can be discarded and that the last is nearer the truth. We have no
reason to say that the management of the Union has no connections with
a trend. We cannot bring such a charge against Shostakovich, for
instance.

It follows, then, that domination was maintained in the interests of
a trend.

There is in fact, then, a sharp though hidden struggle between two
trends taking place in Soviet music. One trend represents the healthy,
progressive principles in Soviet music, based on the acceptance of tile
immense role to be played by the classical heritage, and in particular,
by the Russian school, in the creation of a music which is realist and
of truthful content and is closely and organically linked with the
people and their folk music and folk song – all this combined with a
high degree of professional mastery. The other trend represents a
formalism alien to Soviet art, a rejection of the classical heritage
under the banner of innovation, a rejection of the idea of the popular
origin of music, and of service to the people, in order to gratify the
individualistic emotions of a small group of select aesthetes.

The formalist trend brings about the substitution of a music which
is false, vulgar and often purely pathological, for natural, beautiful,
human music. Furthermore, it is characteristic of this trend to avoid a
frontal attack and to screen its revisionist activities by formally
agreeing with the basic principles of socialist realism. This sort of
underhand method is, of course, nothing new. History can show many
instances of revisionism behind the label of sham agreement with a
given teaching. This makes it all the more necessary to reveal the real
essence of the formalist trend and the damage it has done to the
development of Soviet music.

As an example, there is the attitude towards the classical heritage.
There is no indication whatever that the supporters of the formalist
school are carrying on and developing the traditions of classical
music, however much they may protest to the contrary. Any listener will
tell you that the works of Soviet composers of the formalist type
differ fundamentally from classical music. Classical music is marked by
its truthfulness and realism, its ability to blend brilliant artistic
form with profound content, and to combine the highest technical
achievement with simplicity and intelligibility. Formalism and crude
naturalism are alien to classical music in general and to Russian
classical music in particular. The high level of the idea content in
classical music springs from the recognition of the fact that classical
music has its sources in the musical creative powers of the people, in
a deep respect and love for the people, their music and song.

What a step backward it is along the highroad of musical development
when our formalists, undermining the foundations of true music, compose
music which is ugly and false, permeated with idealist sentiment, alien
to the broad masses of the people, and created not for the million of
Soviet people, but for chosen individuals and small groups, for an
elite. How unlike Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dargomyzhsky,
Mussorgsky, who considered the basis for development of their creative
power to be the ability to express in their works the spirit and
character of the people. By ignoring the wants of the people and its
spirit and creative genius, the formalist trend in music has clearly
demonstrated its anti-popular character.

If a certain section of Soviet composers favour the theory that they
will be appreciated in fifty or a hundred years’ time, and that their
descendants, if not their contemporaries, will understand them, then
the situation is really terrifying. To become accustomed to such an
attitude is extremely dangerous. Such a theory indicates an
estrangement from the people. If I, a writer, an artist, a critic, or a
Party worker, do not count on being understood by my contemporaries,
for whom then do I live and work? Would this not lead to spiritual
sterility and a dead end? We hear that the theory is offered as
consolation to our composers by certain toadying music critics. How can
composers remain indifferent to counsel of that sort and not at least
haul its advocates before a court of honour?

Half-forgotten by us seem to be the clear statements about the
popular roots of music by the “Mighty Few”*
and subsequently too by V. V. Stasov, the great music scholar, when he
associated himself with them. Half-forgotten is Glinka’s “The people
create the music – we, the artists, merely arrange”. We forget, too,
that the classical composers never disdained any genres as long as they
helped to spread the art of music among the broad masses of the people.
Yet you even shun opera as a musical genre and consider it secondary to
instrumental and symphonic music, and in your supercilious attitude
towards song, choral, and concert music you deemed it beneath your
dignity to satisfy the demands of the people in this respect. But
Mussorgsky set the “Gopak” to music, and Glinka used the “Komarinsky”
for one of his best works. It has, in fact, to be admitted that Glinka,
the land-owner, Serov, the civil servant, and Stasov, the nobleman,
were more democratic than you.

*
The “Mighty Few” was a group of Russian musicians formed in 186I by M.
A. Balakirev. Others associated in the group were: Cui, Mussorgsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and, to a limited extent Tchaikovsky.

It is not enough to give glowing assurances that you are all for
popular music; if you are, then why is so little folk music used in
your compositions? Why do deficiencies still crop up which Serov
already criticised when he pointed out that “academic”, i.e.
professional, music was developing parallel with, and independent of,
folk music? Is our instrumental and symphonic music developing in close
interplay with folk music? No. On the contrary. There is an undoubted
gulf, created by the lack of appreciation of folk music by our symphony
writers. Let us recall how Serov described his attitude to folk music.
I have in mind his article The Music of South Russian Song in
which he says:

“Folk songs are musical organisms which are in no way the work of
individual creative talent but compositions of the whole people, and by
all their attributes far removed from artificial music. These flowers
break through the soil into the light quite of their own, as it were,
and grow to full resplendence without the slightest thought about
authorship and composers’ rights and therefore little resemble the
hothouse products of the learned composers’ activity. So it is that,
above all in folk song we find unaffected creative genius and the
wisdom of simplicity, as Gogol puts it so aptly in Dead Souls,
which is the supreme charm and secret of any work of art.

“As a lily in its magnificent raiment of purity puts to shame the
glitter of brocade and precious stones, so is folk music, in its
childlike simplicity, a thousand times richer and stronger than all the
complexities of scholastic invention taught by pedants in
conservatoires and music academies.”

How well and forcefully this is said! How true the formulation of
the main issue: that the development of music must proceed on a
foundation of interplay, that is by enriching “academic” music from
folk music. This theme has practically disappeared from our theoretical
and critical articles today.

National music

Let me now deal with the relationship between national and foreign
music. Some comrades here have quite correctly stated that there is a
passion for, and even a certain orientation towards, contemporary
Western bourgeois music, the music of decadence; and that this
represents one of the basic features of the formalist trend in Soviet
music.

The relationship between Russian music and the music of Western
Europe was dealt with very well by Stasov in his article Drag-chains
on the New Russian Art, in which he says:

“It would be ridiculous to disavow science and knowledge in any
sphere, including that of music. But only the new Russian musicians,
who are not burdened down by the long series of scholastic periods of
the Europe of previous centuries, are able to look science full in the
face: they honour it and make use of its blessings, but they do so
without exaggerated deference. They repudiate the inevitability of dry
and pedantic excess, and reject the acrobatic diversions of science to
which thousands of people in Europe attach so much significance. And
they do not believe that it is necessary to remain long years in
passive submission before its sacred ritual mysteries.”

That is what Stasov said about West European classical music. As
regards contemporary bourgeois music, it would be useless to try and
profit from it, since it is in a state of decay and degradation and the
grovelling attitude towards it is therefore ridiculous.

Research in our Russian, and later, Soviet music must lead to the
conclusion that it grew and developed into a mighty force because it
managed to stand on its own feet and find its own particular roads of
development, which enabled it to disclose the wealth of the inner world
of our people.

Those who consider that the full flowering of national music,
whether Russian music or that of the other peoples of the Soviet Union,
indicates any diminution in the internationalism of art, are making a
serious mistake. Internationalism in art does not spring from the
depletion and impoverishment of national art; on the contrary,
internationalism grows where national culture flourishes. To forget
this is to lose one’s individuality and become a cosmopolitan without a
country.

Only a people that has a highly developed musical culture of its own
can appreciate the musical riches of other nations. It is impossible to
be an internationalist in music or in anything else unless one loves
and respects one’s own people. All the experience of the U.S.S.R.
testifies to that. Our internationalism in music and respect for the
creative genius of other nations is therefore based on the enrichment
and development of our national musical culture which we can then share
with other nations, and is not based on an impoverishment of national
art, blind imitation of foreign styles, and the eradication of all
national characteristics in music. All this should be borne in mind
when dealing with the relationship between Soviet and foreign music.

When we speak of the formalist trend having broken with the
principles of the classical heritage we must also mention the
minimising of the role of programme music. This has already been
mentioned here, but the principal point of the problem has not been
properly clarified.

It is quite obvious that programme music has become so rare that it
is almost non-existent. Matters have reached a point where the content
of a composition is elucidated only after its publication. A whole new
profession has come into being among the critics – that of the
interpreters of new compositions, who try to decipher post factum
and on the basis of personal intuition the content of newly published
compositions, the obscure meaning of which is said to be not always
clear to the composers themselves. The neglect of programme music is
also a departure from progressive traditions. It is well known that
Russian classical music was as a rule programme music.

The question of innovation has been raised here. Innovation has been
shown to be one of the main characteristics of formalism. But
innovation is not an end in itself. The new must be better than the
old, otherwise it is meaningless. It seems to me that the disciples of
formalism use this word chiefly to make propaganda for bad music.

The term innovation must not he applied to any and all cases of
eccentricity and distortion. If one does not want merely to use big
words, then one must be clear about that from which it is necessary to
break away in the old, and that which should be attained in the new. If
that is not done, then talk about innovation can have only one meaning:
revision of the foundations of music and a breaking away from laws and
standards of music which must not be abandoned, not because of any
conservative attitude, but because a break-away does not in any way
represent innovation.

Moreover, innovation does not always imply progress. Many young
musicians are being confused by being told that unless they are
original they are not new and would become imprisoned in conservative
traditions. Since, however, innovation is not synonymous with progress,
the spreading of ideas of this sort means gross delusion, if not
deceit. Furthermore, the “innovations” of the formalists are not new at
all, since all their “novelty” brings to mind contemporary decadent
bourgeois music of Europe and America. This is where we should look for
the real “epigones”.

You will remember that at one time in all primary and secondary
schools there was a passion for “experimental” methods and the “Dalton
Plan”, according to which the part of the teacher was reduced to a
minimum, and every pupil had the right to decide upon the subject of a
lesson. The teacher would arrive in class and say: “Now, what shall we
take today?” The pupils would reply: “Tell us about the Arctic” – “Tell
us about the Antarctic” – “Tell us about Chapayev” – “Tell us about
Dnieprostroy”.

This was called an “experimental” method, but meant in fact that the
whole organisation of study went topsy-turvy: the pupils came to
dominate the teacher, textbooks were treated in helter-skelter fashion,
there was no system of marking. All this was innovation, but I ask you,
was this innovation progressive?

We know that the Party has abolished these “innovations”. Why?
Because, although very “left” in form, they were reactionary through
and through and were leading to the nullification of the school.

Take another example. The Academy of Arts was established not long
ago. Painting is your sister-muse. As you know, at one time there were
strong bourgeois influences at work in painting which came to the
surface now and again under extremely “left” flags and attached to
themselves names like futurism, cubism, and modernism. Under the slogan
of “Overthrow rotten academism”, they called for innovation, and this
innovation reached its most insane point when a girl, for instance,
would be portrayed with one head and forty legs, one eye looking at you
and the other at the North Pole.

How did all that end? With a complete fiasco of the new trend. The
Party fully re-established the significance of the classical heritage
of Repin, Bryullov, Vereshchagin, Vasnetsov and Surikov. Did we act
correctly when we defended the treasure-house of classical painting and
destroyed the liquidators of painting? Perhaps the continued existence
of “schools” of this kind did not mean the liquidation of painting? Or
did the Central Committee, in saving the classical heritage in
painting, act in a conservative manner and under the influence of
“traditionalism” and “epigonism” and so on? Utter nonsense, of course!

Thus it is in music, too. We do not assert that the classical
heritage represents the absolute peak of musical culture. If we said
that it would be tantamount to admitting that progress came to an end
with the classics. Up to now, however, the classics remain unsurpassed.
This means that we must learn and continue to learn, and that we must
adopt all that is best in the classics and all that is essential for
the further development of Soviet music.

Our young people are frightened away from learning from the classics
by a lot of chatter about “epigonism”. The slogan now has it that the
classics must be outdone. That would be very good, of course. But in
order to outdo the classics they must first be equalled, yet you
dismiss the stage of equalling them as though it were a stage already
reached. But to give frank expression to what goes on in the minds of a
Soviet audience one would have to say that it would do no harm if more
compositions appeared among us which approached classical music with
regard to content, form, polish and beauty of melody. If that be
“epigonism” then I suggest that there would be nothing discreditable in
being an “epigone”.

Naturalism

Now to go on to the subject of naturalist distortion: it has become
clear here that departures from the natural and healthy standards of
music are on the increase. Elements of crude naturalism are penetrating
more and more into our music. Ninety years ago Serov warned against the
passion for crude naturalism in the following words:

“In nature there is an infinity of sound of the most diverse and
varied description. In some cases they can be given names like noise,
thunder, rumble, tickle, splashing, droning, humming, tinkling,
howling, creaking, whistling, talking, whispering, rustling and so on;
in others they cannot be expressed in speech. Any of these sounds are
used as material in the musical language only in exceptional cases as,
for example, the ringing of bells, the clashing of cymbals, the
tinkling of a triangle, or the sound of drums and tambourines and so
on. The musical material proper is sound of a special character.”

Is it not true and right that in musical compositions the sound of
cymbals and drums should be the exception and not the rule? Is it not
clear that not every natural sound should be taken into musical
creations? Yet how frequent among us is this unforgivable passion for
vulgar naturalism, which to all intents and purposes is a step
backwards.

It has to be said frankly that a great number of works by
contemporary composers are so saturated with naturalistic sounds that
they remind one either of a dentist’s drill or a musical murder, if you
will excuse the expression. Only, mind you, there is no force whatever
behind it all.

This is the first step beyond the limits of the rational, beyond the
limits not only of normal human emotions but of normal human intellect.
There are, it is true, fashionable “theories” to the effect that a
pathological condition is a higher state, and that schizophrenics and
paranoiacs can attain spiritual heights in their ravings unattainable
by an ordinary person in a normal state. These “theories” are not, of
course, fortuitous. They are very characteristic of the period of decay
and corruption of bourgeois culture. But let us leave all these
“experiments” to the insane and let us ask for normal, human music from
our composers.

What has been the result of the disregard of the laws and standards
of musical creation? Music has taken revenge on those who attempted to
mutilate it. When music ceases to have content and to be highly
artistic, and becomes crude, ugly and vulgar, it ceases to fulfil the
demands which are the reasons for its existence. It ceases to be music.

You may be surprised that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik
Party asks for beauty and grace in music. Yes, we declare that we are
for beautiful and graceful music, for a music which is capable of
satisfying the aesthetic requirements and artistic tastes of the Soviet
people; and these requirements and tastes have developed to an
incredible extent. The people assesses a musical composition according
to how profoundly it reflects the spirit of our epoch and people, and
according to how intelligible it is to the wide masses.

For what is it in music that is proof of genius? It is not something
that can only be grasped by a small group of aesthetes: a musical work
is proved to be a work of genius by the scope of its content and depth,
by its skill, and by the number of people who appreciate it, by the
number of people it is able to inspire. Not all that is readily grasped
is a work of genius, but all that is real genius is readily grasped,
and the greater the genius the more intelligible is it to the broad
masses of the people.

A. N. Serov was profoundly right when he said that “but for the
genuinely and timelessly beautiful in their art there would be
admiration neither for Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, nor for Raphael,
Titian and Poussin, nor for Palestrina, Handel and Gluck….”

The greater a work of music, the more responsive the chords it
strikes in the human spirit. From the point of view of musical
perception man is such a miraculous receiver, working on thousands of
wavelengths – I daresay there are better comparisons – that for him the
tone of one note, the sound from one string, or a single emotion, is
insufficient. A composer capable of striking only one answering note,
or only a few strings, is inadequate, since modern man – and
particularly our Soviet man – is a highly complex organ of receptivity.
Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Serov wrote of the Russian people as being
highly developed musically, and this at a time when classical music had
not yet found a wide understanding among them. In the years of Soviet
power the people’s musical culture has developed to an extraordinary
degree. The artistic tastes of our previously merely musical people
have become greatly enriched, thanks to a wide dissemination of
classical music.

If you have allowed music to become impoverished and if, as in
Muradeli’s opera, the full possibilities of an orchestra and abilities
of singers are not utilised, then you have ceased to satisfy the
musical demands of your audience. As you sow, so you shall reap. Do not
let composers who have written works unintelligible to the people think
that, while the people may not understand this music now, they will do
so when they have become more mature. The people do not need music
which they cannot understand. The composers ought to reproach
themselves instead of the people; they should subject their work to a
critical appraisal in order to understand why they did not please their
people, why they did not merit approval, and in order to understand
what they have to do to make themselves understood by the people and
win their approval. That is the foundation upon which one’s creative
work must be reorganised.

Professional skill

Now I want to go on to deal with the danger of losing professional
skill. Formalist distortion impoverishes music and at the same time
brings with it the danger of professional skill being lost. In this
connection we must examine another widespread error – that of believing
that classical music is rather simple, and that modern music is more
complex; of believing that the complication in technique of modern
music represents a step forward, since all development proceeds from
the simple to the more complex and from the particular to the general.

It is not true that complication of any kind whatever is the
equivalent to a growth in skill. Whoever thinks that any kind of
complication represents progress makes a profound mistake. Here is an
example. We know that literary Russian makes use of a great number of
foreign words, and we know that Lenin ridiculed the misuse of foreign
words and that he came out strongly for a cleansing of the native
language of foreign-bred impurities. A complication of the language by
way of introducing a foreign word for which there is a full equivalent
in the Russian language never did represent a progressive step. For
instance, the foreign word losung [German for “slogan”] has
now been replaced by the Russian word prizyv,
and does not an exchange of this kind represent a step forward? So it
is in music, too. A purely superficial complication of composition
methods camouflages a tendency to impoverish music.

Musical language is becoming inexpressive. So much that is crude and
vulgar and false is being introduced into music that it is beginning to
fail in its function, which is to provide pleasure.

Or is the aesthetic significance of music to be abolished? Is that
what innovation means? Is music a soliloquy – the composer talking to
himself? And if that is the case, why inflict it on the people? This
music becomes anti-popular and super-individualist, and the people have
every right to be indifferent to its fate and are indifferent to it. If
an audience is expected to praise music which is crude, ugly and
vulgar, and based on atonality and continuous dissonance, and if false
notes and combinations of false notes become the rule, and assonance
the exception, then the fundamental standards of music are being
abandoned.

The sum total of this represents a threat to the existence of music,
just as cubism and futurism have as their aim nothing more nor less
than the decay of painting. Music which deliberately ignores the normal
human emotions and jars the mind and nervous system can never be
popular, or of use to society.

The narrow passion for symphonic music without text has been
mentioned here. It is incorrect to ignore all the many genres of music.
What it leads to can again be seen in the example of Muradeli’s opera.
Just call to mind how liberal the great masters of the art were in this
respect. They well understood that the people demanded music in a
variety of genres. Why are you so unlike your great predecessors? You
are far more hard-hearted in this than those who occupied the summit of
their art and yet wrote songs for the people – solo, choral and
orchestral.

Melodiousness is beginning to disappear. A passionate emphasis on
rhythm at the expense of melody is characteristic of modern music. Yet
we know that music can give pleasure only if it contains the essential
elements in a specific harmonic combination. One-sided emphasis leads
to a violation of the correct interaction of the various elements of
music and cannot, of course, be accepted by the normal human ear.

The use of instruments for purposes outside their functions also
comes under the heading of distortion; when for example, the piano is
turned into a percussion instrument. The role of vocal music is being
curtailed for the benefit of a one-sided development of instrumental
music. Vocal music itself concerns itself less and less with the
demands of the normal standards of singing. The criticisms from the
vocalists, expressed here by Comrades Derzhinskaya and Katulskaya, must
be taken into the fullest consideration.

All these and similar departures from the standards of the art of
music represent not only a violation of the fundamentals of musical
sound but also an assault upon the fundamental physiology of normal
human hearing. Unfortunately the theory which deals with the
physiological effect of music on the human organism has been
insufficiently developed. It should be borne in mind, however, that
bad, unharmonious music undoubtedly disturbs the balance of mental and
physiological functions.

Tasks of soviet music

What conclusions can be drawn? The significance of the classical
heritage must be fully restored. The danger of destruction threatening
music from the formalist trend must be stressed and this trend must be
condemned as an assault upon the edifice of the art created by the
great masters of musical culture. Our composers must re-orientate
themselves and turn towards their people. All of them must realise that
our Party, expressing the interests of our state and our people, will
support only a healthy and progressive trend in music, the trend of
Soviet socialist realism.

Comrades, if you value the lofty calling of Soviet composer, you
must prove yourselves capable of serving your people better than you
have done up to the present. You are facing a serious test. The
formalist trend in music was condemned by the Party twelve years ago.
Since then the Government has awarded Stalin prizes to many of you,
among them those guilty of formalism. The rewards you received were in
the nature of a substantial advance payment. We did not consider that
your compositions were free of defects, but we were patient, expecting
our composers to find within themselves the strength to choose the
right road. But it is now clear to everybody that the intervention of
the Party was necessary. The Central Committee tells you bluntly that
our music will never win glory along the road you have chosen.

Soviet composers have two highly responsible tasks. The chief one is
to develop and perfect Soviet music. The other is to protect Soviet
music against penetration by elements of bourgeois decay. We must not
forget that the U.S.S.R. is now the true custodian of the musical
culture of mankind just as she is in all other fields, too, a bulwark
of human civilisation and culture against bourgeois corruption and
decay.

We must take into account the fact that alien bourgeois influences
from abroad will muster what remains of a capitalist outlook in the
minds of some Soviet intellectuals in frivolous and crazy attempts to
replace the treasures of Soviet musical culture by the pitiful tatters
of modern bourgeois art. For this reason not only the musical but also
the political ear of Soviet composers must be very sensitive. Your
contact with the people must be closer than ever before. The ear for
music must be an “ear for criticism” too. You should keep track of the
various stages through which art is passing in the West. But it is your
task not only to prevent the penetration of bourgeois influence into
Soviet music: it is your task, too, to consolidate the supremacy of
Soviet music and to create a mighty Soviet musical culture which will
embody all that is best from the past, and which will reflect Soviet
society of today and enable the culture and the communist consciousness
of our people to attain still greater heights.

We Bolsheviks do not deny our cultural heritage. On the contrary, we
subject to a critical study the cultural heritage of all people and all
ages in order to draw from it all that can inspire the working people
of Soviet society to great achievements in labour, science and culture.
You must help the people in this; and if you do not set yourselves this
task and devote yourselves wholeheartedly to it and give to it all your
enthusiasm and creative ardour, you are not fulfilling your historic
role.

Comrades, we would very much like – we fervently wish – to have in
existence among us our own “Mighty Few”, a group which would be more
numerous and more influential still than that which in its day sent the
fame of its talents around the world and glorified our people. In order
to achieve this you must clear out of your path all that might weaken
you and select only the means and equipment which will make you strong
and mighty. If you use to the full our great musical heritage and at
the same time develop it in the spirit of the new demands of our great
epoch, you will become a Soviet “Mighty Few”. We want to see this
backwardness through which you are passing overcome as quickly as
possible, so that you can the sooner re-orientate yourselves and become
a glorious cohort of Soviet composers, the pride of the entire Soviet
people.

On philosophy

Speech at a Conference of Soviet Philosophical
Workers, 1947

Comrades, the discussion of the book by Comrade Alexandrov has not
been confined to the subject under debate. It has transcended it in
breadth and depth, posing also more general questions of the situation
of the philosophical front. The discussion has been transformed into a
kind of all-Union conference on the condition of our scientific work in
philosophy. This, of course, is quite natural and legitimate. The
creation of a textbook on the history of philosophy, the first Marxist
textbook in this sphere, represents a task of enormous scientific and
political significance. It is therefore not accidental that the Central
Committee has given so much attention to the question and has organised
the present discussion.

To prepare and write a good textbook on the history of philosophy
means to equip our intellectuals, our cadres, our youth with a new,
powerful ideological weapon and at the same time to take a great step
forward in the development of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Hence, the
high level of the requirements for such textbook was expressed in the
discussion. The extension of the range of the discussion has,
therefore, been profitable. Its results will, without doubt, be great,
the more so since we have here dealt not only with questions connected
with the evaluation of the textbook, but also with the broader problems
of philosophical work.

I shall permit myself to discuss both themes. It is not at all my
intention to summarise the discussion – this is the task of the author.
I speak as a participant in the debate.

I ask in advance to be excused if I have recourse to quotations,
although Comrade Baskin has repeatedly warned all of us against this
procedure. Of course, it is easy for him, an old philosophical
sea-wolf, to plough through seas and oceans without navigation
instruments, by the eye of inspiration, as sailors say. But you will
have to permit me, a novice, treading for the first time the unsteady
deck of the philosophical ship in time of terrible storm, to use
quotations as a sort of compass which will prevent me from being driven
off my correct course.

I now pass to the remarks on the textbook.

I. The shortcomings of
Comrade Alexandrov’s book

I believe that from a textbook on the history of philosophy we have
a right to demand the fulfilment of the following conditions, which, in
my opinion, are elementary.

(1) It is necessary that the subject – the history of philosophy as
a science – be precisely defined.
(2) The textbook should be scientific – i.e., based on
fundamental present-day achievements of dialectical and historical
materialism.
(3) It is essential that the exposition of the history of
philosophy be a creative and not a scholastic work; it should be
directly linked with the tasks of the present, should lead to their
elucidation, and should give the perspective for the further
development of philosophy.
(4) The facts cited should be fully verified.
(5) The style should be clear, precise and convincing.

I consider that this textbook does not meet these demands.

Let us begin with the subject of science.

Comrade Kivenko has pointed out that Comrade Alexandrov does not
present a clear idea of the subject of the science, and that although
the book contains a large number of definitions having individual
importance, in that they illuminate only individual aspects of the
question, one does not find in the work an exhaustive general
definition. That observation is entirely correct.

Neither is the subject of the history of philosophy as a science
defined. The definition given on page 14 is incomplete. The definition
on page 22, italicised, apparently as a basic definition, is
essentially incorrect. Should one agree with the author that “the
history of philosophy is the history of the progressive, ascending
development of man’s knowledge of the surrounding world”, it would mean
that the subject of the history of philosophy coincides with that of
the history of science in general, in which case philosophy itself
would appear as the science of sciences. This conception was long ago
rejected by Marxism.

Materialism versus Idealism

The author’s assertion that the history of philosophy is also the
history of the rise and development of many contemporary ideas is
likewise incorrect because the concept “contemporary” is here
identified with the concept “scientific”, which, naturally, is
erroneous. In defining the subject of the history of philosophy it is
necessary to proceed from the definition of philosophical science given
by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

“This revolutionary side of Hegel’s philosophy was adopted and
developed by Marx. Dialectical materialism no longer needs any
philosophy standing above the other sciences. Of former philosophy
there remains the science of thought and its laws – formal logic and
dialectics. And dialectics, as understood by Marx, and in conformity
with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or
epistemology, which, too, must regard its subject matter historically,
studying and generalising the origin and development of knowledge, the
transition from non-knowledge to knowledge.” – (Lenin, Karl Marx.)

Consequently the scientific history of philosophy is the history of
the birth, rise and development of the scientific materialist world
outlook and its laws. Inasmuch as materialism grew and developed in the
struggle with idealist trends, the history of philosophy is at the same
time the history of the struggle of materialism with idealism.

As to the scientific character, depth and breadth of the book from
the standpoint of its utilising contemporary attainments of dialectical
and historical materialism, in this respect, too, it suffers from many
serious inadequacies.

A Revolution in Philosophy

The author describes the history of philosophy and the development
of philosophical ideas and systems as a smooth, evolutionary process
through the accumulation of quantitative changes. The impression is
created that Marxism arose simply as the successor to preceding
progressive teachings – primarily the teachings of the French
materialists, of English political economy, and the idealist school of
Hegel.

On page 475 the author states that the philosophical theories
formulated before Marx and Engels, although occasionally containing
great discoveries, were not fully consistent and scientific in all
their conclusions. Such a definition distinguishes Marxism from
pre-Marxist philosophical systems only as a theory fully consistent and
scientific in all conclusions. Consequently, the difference between
Marxism and pre-Marxist philosophical teachings consists only in that
the latter were not fully consistent and scientific; the old
philosophers merely “erred”.

As you see, it is a question here only of quantitative changes. But
that is metaphysics. The rise of Marxism was a genuine discovery, a
revolution in philosophy. Like every discovery, like every leap, like
every break in gradualness, like every transition into a new condition,
the rise of Marxism could not have occurred without the previous
accumulation of quantitative changes – in the given instance, the
stages of development of philosophy prior to the discovery of Marx and
Engels. But the author obviously does not understand that Marx and
Engels created a new philosophy, differing qualitatively from all
previous philosophical systems, however progressive they were.

The relation of Marxist philosophy to all preceding philosophies and
the basic change which Marxism effected in philosophy, transforming it
into a science, is well known to all. All the more strange, therefore,
is the fact that the author focuses his attention, not on that which is
new and revolutionary in Marxism, but on that which united it with the
development of pre-Marxist philosophy. And yet Marx and Engels stated
that their discovery meant the end of the old philosophy.

Marxism and the End of the Old Philosophy

Evidently the author does not understand the historical process of
the development of philosophy. One of the essential shortcomings of the
book, if not the principal one, is its ignoring of the fact that in the
course of history, not only do views on this or that philosophical
question undergo change, but the very range of these questions, the
very subject of philosophy, undergoes a constant change, which is in
complete conformity with the dialectical nature of human cognition and
should be clear to all real dialecticians.

On page 24 of his book, expounding the philosophy of the ancient
Greeks, Comrade Alexandrov writes: “Philosophy as an independent sphere
of knowledge arose in the slave society of ancient Greece.” And
further: “Philosophy, arising in the sixth century B.C. as a special
sphere of knowledge, became widely diffused.”

But can we speak of the philosophy of the ancient Greeks as a
special, differentiated sphere of knowledge? On no account. The
philosophical views of the Greeks were so closely interwoven with their
natural science and with their political views that we should not, and
have no right to, transfer to Greek science our own division of the
sciences, the classification of the sciences which came later.
Essentially, the Greeks knew only one, undifferentiated science, into
which there entered also their philosophical conceptions. Whether we
take Democritus, Epicurus or Aristotle – all of them in equal degree
confirm the thought of Engels that “the oldest Greek philosophers were
at the same time investigators of nature”. (Frederick Engels, Dialectics
of Nature, p. 245.)

The unique character of the development of philosophy resides in the
fact that from it, as the scientific knowledge of nature and society
developed, the positive sciences branched off one after another.
Consequently, the domain of philosophy was continually reduced on
account of the development of the positive sciences. (I might add that
this process has not ended even up to the present time.) This
emancipation of the natural and social sciences from the aegis of
philosophy constitutes a progressive process, for the natural and
social sciences as well as for philosophy itself.

The creators of the philosophical systems of the past, who laid
claim to the knowledge of absolute truth in the ultimate sense, were
unable to further the development of the natural sciences, since
aspiring to stand above the sciences, they swaddled them with their
schemes, imposing on living human understanding conclusions dictated,
not by real life, but by the requirements of their philosophic system.
And so philosophy was transformed into a museum in which were piled the
most diverse facts, conclusions, hypotheses, and simply fantasies. If
philosophy was nevertheless able to serve as a means of surveying
phenomena, of contemplation, it still was not suitable as an instrument
for practical influence on the world, as an instrument for
understanding the world.

The last system of this kind was the system of Hegel, who attempted
to erect a philosophical structure, subordinating all other sciences,
pressing them into the procrustean bed of its own categories. Hegel
counted on solving all contradictions, but fell into a hopeless
contradiction with the dialectical method which he himself had divined
but not understood, and hence applied incorrectly. But:

“... As soon as we have once realised... that the task of philosophy
thus stated means nothing but the task that a single philosopher should
accomplish that which can only be accomplished by the entire human race
in its progressive development – as soon as we realise that, there is
an end of all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense of the word.
One leaves alone ‘absolute truth’, which is unattainable along this
path or by any single individual; instead, one pursues attainable,
relative truths along the path of the positive sciences, and the
summation of their results by means of dialectical thinking.”
(Frederick Engels. Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 25.)

The discovery of Marx and Engels represents the end of the old
philosophy, i.e., the end of that philosophy which claimed to give a
universal explanation of the world.

Comrade Alexandrov’s vague formulations blur the great revolutionary
significance of the philosophical discoveries of Marx and Engels, since
he emphasises that which connected Marx with the antecedent
philosophers, but fails to show that with Marx there begins a
completely new period in the history of philosophy – philosophy which
for the first time has become science.

A Scientific Philosophy of the Proletariat

In close connection with this error, we find in Alexandrov’s book a
non-Marxist treatment of the history of philosophy as the gradual
change from one philosophical school to another. With the appearance of
Marxism as the scientific world outlook of the proletariat ends the old
period in the history of philosophy, when philosophy was the occupation
of isolated individuals, the possession of philosophical schools
consisting of a small number of philosophers and their disciples,
detached from life and the people, and alien to the people.

Marxism is not such a philosophical school. On the contrary, it
supersedes the old philosophy – philosophy that was the property of a
small elite, the aristocracy of the intellect. It marked the beginning
of a completely new period in the history of philosophy, when it became
a scientific weapon in the hands of the proletarian masses in their
struggle for emancipation from capitalism.

Marxist philosophy, as distinguished from preceding philosophical
systems, is not a science above other sciences; rather, it is an
instrument of scientific investigation, a method, penetrating all
natural and social sciences, enriching itself with their attainments in
the course of their development. In this sense Marxist philosophy is
the most complete and decisive negation of all preceding philosophy.
But to negate, as Engels emphasised, does not mean merely to say “no”.
Negation includes continuity, signifies absorption, the critical
reforming and unification in a new and higher synthesis of everything
advanced and progressive that has been achieved in the history of human
thought.

Hence it follows that the history of philosophy, inasmuch as there
exists the Marxist dialectical method, must include the history of the
preparatory development of that method, showing that which conditioned
its rise. Alexandrov’s book does not give the history of logic and
dialectics, does not show the development of the logical categories as
the reflection of human practice; because of this the quotation from
Lenin in the introduction to the book, to the effect that every
category of dialectical logic should be considered a nodal point in the
history of human thought, hangs in the air.

Entirely indefensible is the fact that the book brings the history
of philosophy only up to the rise of Marxist philosophy, that is, to
1848. Without presenting the history of philosophy during the last
hundred years, the work naturally cannot be considered a textbook. Why
the author has so pitilessly wronged this period remains a mystery, and
no explanation is to be found either in the preface or in the
introduction.

Nor is the reason indicated for the failure to include the history
of the development of Russian philosophy. It is not necessary to
emphasise that this omission involves principle. Whatever the author’s
motives for excluding the history of Russian philosophy from a general
history of philosophy, its omission objectively means belittlement of
the role of Russian philosophy; it artificially divides the history of
philosophy into the history of Western European and of Russian
philosophy. The author makes no attempt to explain the necessity for
such a division. This separation perpetuates the bourgeois division
into “Western” and “Eastern” culture and presents Marxism as a regional
“Western” current.

On page 6 of the introduction, the author ardently argues the
reverse position

“Without studying diligently and utilising the profound criticism of
the philosophical systems of the past given by the classics of Russian
philosophy, it is impossible to achieve a scientific understanding of
the development of philosophic thought in Western European countries.”

Why, then, did the author fail to adhere to this correct position in
his book? This remains absolutely incomprehensible and, taken together
with the arbitrary termination at 1848, it produces a vexing
impression.

The comrades who spoke in the discussion have also pointed out the
gaps in the presentation of the history of the philosophy of the East.

It is clear that for this reason as well the book requires radical
revision.

Some comrades have indicated that the introduction to the book,
which obviously should present the author’s credo,
correctly defines the tasks and methods of the investigation of the
subject, but that the author somehow has not fulfilled his promises. I
believe that this criticism is inadequate; for the introduction itself
is faulty and cannot stand up to criticism.

I have already mentioned the incorrect and inaccurate definition of
the subject of the history of philosophy. But that is not all. The
introduction contains other theoretical errors. Some comrades have
pointed out the strained manner in which the author, dealing with the
foundations of the Marxist-Leninist history of philosophy, refers to
Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Lomonosov, who, of course, have no
direct relation to the question under discussion. The question,
however, involves more than this. The quotations from the works of
these great Russian scientists and philosophers were badly selected.
The theoretical propositions which they contain are from the Marxist
point of view incorrect and, I would add, even dangerous. I have not
the slightest intention of casting any aspersion on the quoted authors,
since the quotations were selected arbitrarily and are related to
questions that have nothing in common with the subject with which the
author is dealing. The point is that the author refers to Chernyshevsky
in order to show that the founders of different, although
contradictory, philosophic systems must regard one another tolerantly.

Allow me to cite the quotation from Chernyshevsky:

“The heirs of scientific work rise against their predecessors whose
work served as the point of departure for their own labours. Thus,
Aristotle took a hostile view of Plato, thus Socrates thoroughly
humiliated the Sophists, whose heir he was. In modern times there are
so many examples of this. But there are happy instances when founders
of a new system understand clearly the connection of their judgments
with the ideas of their predecessors and modestly consider themselves
their disciples; when in disclosing the inadequacy in the ideas of
their predecessors, they at the same time clearly manifest how much
these ideas contributed to the development of their own. Such was the
case, for instance, in the relation of Spinoza to Descartes. To the
honour of the founders of modern science, it must be said that they
look upon their predecessors with respect and almost filial affection,
fully acknowledging the greatness of their genius and the noble
character of their teaching, in which they indicate the germs of their
own views.”

Inasmuch as the author offers this quotation without reservation, it
obviously appears be his own point of view. If that is so, the author
actually takes the position of denying the principle of the party
character of philosophy, inherent in Marxism-Leninism.

It is well known with what passion and irreconcilability
Marxism-Leninism has always conducted the sharpest struggle against all
enemies of materialism. In this struggle Marxist-Leninists subject
their opponents to ruthless criticism. An example of Bolshevik struggle
against the opponents of materialism is Lenin’s book, Materialism
anti Empirio-Criticism, in which every sentence is like a piercing
sword, annihilating an opponent. Lenin wrote:

“The genius of Marx and Engels consisted in the very fact that over
a long period, nearly half a century, they developed materialism, that
they further advanced one fundamental trend in philosophy, that they
did not confine themselves to reiterating epistemological problems that
had already been solved, but consistently applied – and showed how
to apply – this same
materialism in the sphere of the social sciences, mercilessly brushing
aside as litter and rubbish the pretentious rigmarole, the innumerable
attempts to ‘discover’ a ‘new’ line in philosophy, to invent a ‘new’
trend and so forth ....

“And finally, take the various philosophical utterances by Marx in Capital
and other works and you will find an invariable basic motif,
viz., insistence upon materialism and contemptuous derision
of all obscurantism, of all confusion and all deviations towards idealism.
All
Marx’s philosophical utterances revolve within these fundamental
opposites, and, in the eyes of professional philosophy, their defect
lies in this ‘narrowness’ and ‘one-sidedness’.” (V. I Lenin, Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism)

Lenin, we know, did not spare his opponents. In all attempts to blur
and reconcile the contradictions between philosophical tendencies,
Lenin always saw the manoeuvre of reactionary professorial philosophy.
How then after that could Comrade Alexandrov appear in his book as a
preacher of toothless vegetarianism in relation to philosophical
opponents, presenting unqualified tribute to professorial
quasi-objectivism, when Marxism arose, developed and triumphed in a
merciless struggle against all representatives of the idealist
tendency?

Comrade Alexandrov does not confine himself to this. He constantly
applies his objectivist ideas throughout the book. It is not
accidental, therefore, that Comrade Alexandrov, before criticising some
bourgeois philosopher, pays “tribute” to his merits and burns incense
to him. Let us take, for example, the teaching of Fourier on the four
phases in the development of mankind.

The great achievement of the social philosophy of Fourier, says
Comrade Alexandrov,

“...is his theory of the development of mankind. In its development
society passes, according to Fourier, through four phases: (1)
ascending disintegration; (2) ascending harmony; (3) descending
harmony; (4) descending disintegration. In the last stage mankind
experiences a period of senility, after which all life on earth comes
to an end. Inasmuch as the development of society proceeds
independently of human will, a higher stage of development arises just
as unfailingly as the change of seasons. From this Fourier drew the
conclusion of the inevitable transformation of the bourgeois system
into society in which free and collective labour would prevail. True,
Fourier’s theory of development of society was limited by the
conception of the four phases, but for that period it represents a
great step forward.”

There is not a trace of Marxist analysis in this. By comparison with
what does the theory of Fourier represent a step forward? If its
limitation consisted in that it spoke of four phases of the development
of mankind, with the fourth phase constituting descending
disintegration, as a result of which all life on earth comes to an end,
then how shall we understand the author’s criticism of Fourier that his
theory of social development is limited within the confines of the four
phases, when the fifth phase for mankind could consist only of life in
the hereafter?

Comrade Alexandrov finds it possible to say something good about
almost every philosopher of the past. The more eminent the bourgeois
philosopher, the greater the flattery that is offered him. All of this
shows that Comrade Alexandrov, perhaps without being aware of it, is
himself a captive of bourgeois historians, who proceed from the
assumption that every philosopher is first of all a professional
associate, and only secondarily an opponent. Such conceptions, if they
should take hold among us, would lead inevitably to objectivism, to
subservience to bourgeois philosophers and exaggeration of their
services, towards depriving our philosophy of its militant offensive
spirit. And that would signify the departure from the basic principle
of materialism – its principle of direction, its partisanship. Well did
Lenin teach us that “materialism includes, so to speak, partisanship,
i.e. the obligation when estimating any event to adopt directly and
frankly the viewpoint of a definite social group”.

The exposition of philosophical views in Alexandrov’s book is
abstract, objectivist, neutral. Philosophical schools are placed one
after another or one near the other in the book, but are not shown in
struggle against one another. That, too, is a “tribute” to the academic
professorial “tendency”. In this connection, it is apparently not
accidental that the author’s exposition of the principle of
partisanship in philosophy is not satisfactory. The author refers to
the philosophy of Hegel as an example of partisanship in philosophy;
and the struggle of antagonistic philosophies has for him its
illustration in the struggle of the reactionary and progressive
principles within Hegel himself. Such a method of demonstration is not
only objectivist eclecticism, but it clearly embellishes Hegel,
inasmuch as in this way one wants to show that in Hegel’s philosophy
there is as much progressive as there is reactionary content.

To conclude on this point, I may add that Comrade Alexandrov’s
method of evaluating various philosophical systems – “along with merits
there are also shortcomings”, or “the following theory is also of
importance” – is extremely vague, is metaphysical, and can only confuse
the issue. It is incomprehensible why Comrade Alexandrov chose to pay
tribute to the academic scientific traditions of the old bourgeois
schools, forgetting the fundamental principle of materialism which
demands irreconcilability in the struggle against one’s opponents.

A further remark. A critical study of philosophical systems must
have an orientation. Philosophical views and ideas long slain and
buried should not attract much attention. On the other hand,
philosophical systems and ideas still current, which, their reactionary
characters notwithstanding, are being utilised today by the enemies of
Marxism, demand especially sharp criticism. This includes, particularly
neo-Kantianism, theology, old and new editions of agnosticism, the
attempts to smuggle God into modern natural science, and every other
cookery that has for its aim the freshening up of stale idealist
merchandise for the market. That is the arsenal which the philosopher
lackeys of imperialism make use of at the present time in order to give
support to their frightened masters.

On the Method of Dialectical Materialism

The introduction to the book also contains an incorrect treatment of
the notions of reactionary and progressive ideas and philosophical
systems. The author states that the question of the reactionary or
progressive character of one or another idea or philosophical system
should be determined on the basis of historical conditions. Time and
again, however, he ignores the established position of Marxism that the
same idea can be reactionary or progressive under different concrete
historical conditions. By obscuring this point, he creates an opening
for the smuggling in of the idealist conception of ideas as independent
history.

While the author correctly notes that the development of
philosophical thought in the final analysis is determined by the
material conditions of social life and that the development of
philosophical thought has only relative independence, he repeatedly
violates that basic position of scientific materialism. Time and again
he presents the various philosophical systems without relating them to
their actual historical environment, and without showing the social and
class roots of this or that philosopher.

That is the case, for instance, with his exposition of the
philosophical views of Socrates, Democritus, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Feuerbach, and others. Such a method is clearly not scientific; it
justifies the assumption that the author has slipped into the habit of
treating the development of philosophical ideas as independent of
history, a distinguishing characteristic of idealist philosophy.

The failure to show the organic connection of this or that
philosophical system with its historical environment is evident even
where the author attempts to give an analysis of that environment. What
we have in those instances is a purely mechanical, formal, and not a
living organic connection. The divisions and chapters dealing with the
philosophical views of a particular epoch, and those discussing the
historical circumstances, revolve upon parallel planes, while the
presentation of the historical data – the link of causation between the
basis and superstructure – is given as a rule unscientifically, and in
a slipshod manner. It does not provide material for analysis but rather
presents an inadequate frame of reference.

Such, for example, is the introduction to Chapter VI, entitled
“Eighteenth-Century France”, which is utterly irrelevant and which in
no way elucidates the sources of the ideas of French philosophy in the
eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
Consequently, the ideas of the French philosophers lose their
connection with the epoch and begin to appear as independent phenomena
of some kind. Allow me to quote this:

“Beginning with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, France,
after England, gradually takes the road of bourgeois development,
experiencing radical changes in a hundred years in its economy,
politics and ideology. Although still backward, the country began to
free itself of its feudal inertia. Like many other European states of
that time, France entered the period of primary capitalist
accumulation.

“The new bourgeois social structure was rapidly taking shape in all
spheres of social life, quickly giving rise to a new ideology, a new
culture. About that time we witness in France the beginning of a rapid
growth of such cities as Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and Havre, and of the
development of a strong merchant fleet. International trading companies
arose one after another, and military expeditions were organised which
conquered a number of colonies. Trade grew rapidly. In the years
1784-1788 the turnover of external trade reached 1,011,000 livres,
exceeding more than four times the trade of 1716-1720. The growth of
trade was facilitated by the Treaty of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) (1748)
and the Treaty of Paris (1763). Especially significant was the trade in
books. Thus, for instance, in 1774 the turnover in the book trade in
France reached 45 million francs, while in England it stood only at
12-13 million francs. France held nearly half the gold supply of
Europe. At the same time France still remained an agrarian country. The
overwhelming majority of the population was agrarian.”

That, of course, is no analysis; it is merely an enumeration of a
number of facts set forth without relation to one another, but simply
in juxtaposition. It is obvious that from these data as “basis” one
cannot derive any characteristic of French philosophy, the development
of which appears detached from the historical conditions of the France
of that period.

Let us take as a further example the description of the rise of
German idealist philosophy. Alexandrov writes:

“Germany in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth
centuries was a backward country with a reactionary political regime.
Feudal-serf and artisan-guild relations prevailed in it. At the end of
the eighteenth century the urban population was less than 25 per cent
of the total, while the artisans constituted only 4 per cent. Corvée,
quit-rent, serfdom, and guild restrictions hindered the development of
embryonic capitalist relations. Moreover, the country was split up into
excessively numerous political divisions.”

Comrade Alexandrov cites the percentage of urban population in
Germany to illustrate the backwardness of that country and the
reactionary character of its state and social political structure. But
in that same period the urban population of France was less than 10 per
cent of the whole; nevertheless, France was not a backward feudal land,
as was Germany, but the centre of the bourgeois revolutionary movement
in Europe. Consequently, the percentage of urban population itself does
not explain anything. More than that, the fact itself must be explained
by the concrete historical conditions. This, too, is an example of the
inept use of historical material to explain the rise and development of
one or another form of ideology.

Alexandrov writes further:

“The most prominent ideologists of the German bourgeoisie of that
period – Kant and later Fichte and Hegel – expressed through their
idealist philosophies, in an abstract form, conditioned by the
narrowness of German reality, the ideology of the German bourgeoisie of
that epoch.”

Let us compare this cold, indifferent, objectivist statement of
facts, from which it is impossible to understand the causes for the
rise of German idealism, with the Marxist analysis of the conditions of
that time in Germany, presented in a living, militant style, which
stirs and convinces the reader. This is how Engels characterises the
situation in Germany:

“ ... It was all one living mass of putrefaction and repulsive
decay. Nobody felt himself at ease. The trade, commerce, industry and
agriculture of the country were reduced to almost nothing; peasantry,
tradesmen and manufacturers felt the double pressure of a blood-sucking
government and bad trade; the nobility, and princes found that their
incomes, in spite of the squeezing of their inferiors, could not be
made to keep pace with their increasing expenditures; everything was
wrong, and a general uneasiness prevailed throughout the country. No
education, no means of operating upon the minds of the masses, no free
press, no public spirit, not even an extended commerce with other
countries – nothing but meanness and selfishness – a mean, sneaking,
miserable shopkeeping spirit pervading the whole people. Everything
worn out, crumbling down, going fast to ruin, and not even the
slightest hope of a beneficial change, not even so much strength in the
nation as might have sufficed for carrying away the putrid corpses of
dead institutions.” (Frederick Engels, The State of Germany
in the Northern Star, October 25, 1845; Marx-Engels,
Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band IV, p. 482.)

Compare this clear, sharp, exact, profoundly scientific
characterisation given by Engels with that which Alexandrov gives and
you will see how badly Comrade Alexandrov utilises the material already
available in the inexhaustible wealth left us by the founders of
Marxism.

The author has failed to apply the materialist method to the
exposition of the history of philosophy. This deprives the book of
scientific character, making of it, to a considerable extent, an
account of the biographies of the philosophers and their philosophic
systems, unrelated to historical conditions. This violates the
principle of historical materialism:

“All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of
the different formations of society must be individually examined
before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political,
civil-legal, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., notions
corresponding to them.” (Engels to Conrad Schmidt, August 5, 1890)

The author, further, sets forth unclearly and inadequately the
purpose of the study of the history of philosophy. Nowhere does he
emphasise that one of the fundamental tasks of philosophy and its
history is to continue the development of philosophy as a science, to
deduce new laws, to verify its propositions in practice, to replace old
theses with new ones. The author proceeds chiefly from the pedagogical
aspects of the history of philosophy, from the cultural-educational
task. And so he gives to the whole study of the history of philosophy a
passive, contemplative, academic character. That, of course, does not
correspond to the Marxist-Leninist definition of philosophical science,
which, like every science, must continuously be developed, perfected,
enriched by new propositions, while it discards the obsolete.

The author concentrates on the pedagogical aspects, thus placing
limitations on the development of the science, as though
Marxism-Leninism had already reached its apex and as though the task of
developing our theory were no longer a main task. Such reasoning is
inconsistent with the spirit of Marxism-Leninism inasmuch as it
introduces the metaphysical idea of Marxism as a completed and
perfected theory: it can lead only to the drying up of living and
penetrating philosophical thought.

Philosophy and the Natural Sciences

Likewise unsatisfactory is the author’s treatment of the development
of the natural sciences in that period when the history of philosophy
could not be expounded apart from the successes of the natural sciences
without direct harm to science. Thus, Comrade Alexandrov fails to
clarify the conditions for the rise and development of scientific
materialism on the granite foundation of the achievements of modern
natural science.

In expounding the history of philosophy, Alexandrov managed to sever
it from the history of the natural sciences. It is characteristic that
the introduction, which sets forth the main premises of the book, fails
to mention the interrelation of philosophy and the natural sciences.
The author does not refer to the natural sciences even when such
silence would seem impossible. Thus, on page 9, he writes: “Lenin in
his works, particularly in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
studied the Marxist theory of society in all its aspects and further
developed it.” In speaking of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
Comrade Alexandrov managed to say nothing about the problems of natural
science and its connection with philosophy.

One is struck by the extremely poor and abstract characterisation of
the level of natural science at various periods. Thus, with regard to
the natural science of the ancient Greeks, we read that there took
place “the birth of the sciences of nature”. With regard to the epoch
of the later scholasticism (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) we read
that “there appeared many inventions and technical improvements”.

Where the author attempts to clarify such vague formulations, we get
only an inadequately connected enumeration of discoveries. Moreover,
the book contains flagrant errors, disclosing an amazing ignorance of
questions of natural science. Of what value, for instance, is this
description of the development of science in the epoch of the
Renaissance:

“The learned Guerricke constructed his famous pneumatic pump, and
the existence of atmospheric pressure which replaced the notion of
vacuum, was demonstrated practically at first through the experiment
with hemispheres at Magdeburg. In the course of centuries people argued
about the location of the centre of the universe, and whether our
planet was to be considered that centre. But then Copernicus made his
entrance into science, and later Galileo. The latter proved the
existence of spots on the sun and their change of position. He saw in
this, and other discoveries, confirmation of the teaching of Copernicus
on the heliocentric structure of our solar system. The barometer taught
people to forecast the weather. The microscope replaced the system of
conjectures regarding the life of the minutest organisms and played a
large part in the development of biology. The compass helped Columbus
to prove by experience the spherical structure of our planet.”

Nearly every one of these sentences is absurd. How could atmospheric
pressure replace the notion of vacuum? Does the existence of atmosphere
negate the existence of vacuum? In what way did the movement of the
sun-spots confirm the teaching of Copernicus?

The idea that the barometer forecasts weather is in the same
unscientific vein. Unfortunately, even today people have not yet fully
learned how to forecast the weather, as is well known to all of you
from the practices of our own Weather Bureau.

Further, can the microscope replace the system of conjecture? And,
finally, what is this “spherical structure of our planet”? Until now it
has seemed that “spherical” could refer only to shape.

Alexandrov’s book is full of such pearls.

But the author is guilty of even more fundamental errors of
principle. He states that the way was prepared for the dialectical
method by the advances of natural science “as early as the second half
of the eighteenth century”. This basically contradicts Engels’
well-known statement that the dialectical method was prepared for by
the discovery of the cellular structure of organisms, by the theory of
the conservation and transformation of energy, by the theory of Darwin.
All these discoveries date from the nineteenth century. On this false
assumption, the author proceeds to enumerate the discoveries of the
eighteenth century and speaks extensively of Galvani, Laplace and
Lyell, but as regards the three great discoveries indicated by Engels
he limits himself to the following:

“Thus, for instance, already during the life of Feuerbach, there was
established the cellular theory, the theory of the transformation of
energy, and there appeared the theory of Darwin on the origin of
species through natural selection.”

Such are the basic weaknesses of the book. I shall not digress upon
incidental and secondary weaknesses; neither will I repeat the highly
valuable remarks of criticism, from the theoretical and the practical
standpoint, which have been made during the discussion.

The conclusion is that the textbook is bad, that it must be
basically revised. But such revision means first of all overcoming the
false and confused conceptions which are manifestly current among our
philosophers, including leading ones. I now pass to the second
question, the question of the situation on our philosophical front.

II. The situation on the
philosophical front

The fact that Comrade Alexandrov’s book was accepted by the majority
of our leading philosophical workers, that it was presented for a
Stalin prize, that it was recommended as a textbook and received many
laudatory reviews, shows that other philosophical workers obviously
share the mistakes of Comrade Alexandrov. This bespeaks a most
unsatisfactory situation on our theoretical front.

The fact that the book did not evoke any considerable protest, that
it required the intervention of the Central Committee, and particularly
Comrade Stalin, to expose its inadequacies, shows the absence of
developed Bolshevik criticism and self-criticism on the philosophical
front. The lack of creative discussions, of criticism and
self-criticism, could not but have a harmful effect upon our scientific
work in philosophy. It is known that philosophical works are entirely
insufficient in quantity and weak in quality. Monographs and articles
on philosophy are a rare occurrence.

Many have spoken here of the need for a philosophical journal. The
need for such a journal is questionable. We have not yet forgotten the
deplorable experience with the periodical Under the Banner of
Marxism. It seems to me that the present possibilities for
publishing original monographs and articles are not utilised
adequately.

Comrade Svetlov stated here that the reading public of Bolshevik
is not the public for theoretical works of a special character. I think
that this is entirely incorrect and proceeds from an obvious
underestimation of the high level of our readers and their demands.
Such an opinion, it seems to me, comes from a failure to understand
that our philosophy is not the property merely of a group of
professional philosophers, but belongs to our entire Soviet
intelligentsia. There was definitely nothing bad in the tradition of
the advanced Russian magazines of the pre-revolutionary epoch, which
published, along with articles on literature and art, scientific works,
including philosophical studies. Our magazine Bolshevik
speaks to a far larger audience than any philosophical journal, and to
enclose the creative work of our philosophers in a specialised
philosophical journal, it seems to me, would create the danger of
narrowing the basis of our philosophical work. Please do not take me
for an opponent of a journal. It seems to me that the paucity of
philosophical studies in our journals and in Bolshevik
invites us to begin to overcome this weakness in their pages first,
especially in the journals which from time to time even now publish
philosophical articles of scientific and social interest.

Our leading philosophical institute – the Institute of Philosophy of
the Academy of Sciences – in my opinion, presents a rather
unsatisfactory picture, too. It does not gather to itself the workers
in the periphery, and, having no connection with them is therefore not
in reality an institution of an All-Union character. Philosophers in
the provinces are left to themselves, although they represent a great
force which unfortunately is not utilised. Philosophical studies,
including works submitted for university degrees, turn for their themes
toward the past, toward quiet and less responsible historical subjects
of the type of “The Copernican Heresy – Past and Present”. This leads
toward a certain reviving of scholasticism.

From this point of view the dispute about Hegel which took place
here appears strange. The participants in that dispute forced an open
door. The question of Hegel was settled long ago. There is no reason
whatsoever to pose it anew. No material was presented here beyond that
which had already been analysed and evaluated. The discussion itself
was irritating in its scholasticism and as unproductive as the probings
at one time in certain circles into such questions as to whether one
should cross oneself with two or with three fingers, or whether God can
create a stone which he cannot lift, or whether the mother of God was a
virgin. Urgent present-day problems are hardly dealt with at all.

All this taken together is pregnant with great dangers, much greater
than you imagine. The gravest danger is the fact that some of you have
already fallen into the habit of accepting these weaknesses.

Advancing Our Philosophical Front

Our philosophical work does not manifest either a militant spirit or
a Bolshevik tempo. Considered in that light, some of the erroneous
theses of Alexandrov’s textbook reflect the lag on the entire
philosophical front, thus constituting, not an isolated accidental
event, but an entire phenomenon.

We have often used in our discussion the term “philosophical front”.
But where is this front? When we speak of the philosophical front, it
immediately suggests an organised detachment of militant philosophers
perfectly equipped with Marxist theory, waging a determined offensive
against hostile ideology abroad and against the survivals of bourgeois
ideology in the consciousness of Soviet people within our country – a
detachment ceaselessly advancing our science, arming the working people
of our socialist society with the consciousness of the correctness of
our path, and with scientifically grounded confidence in the ultimate
victory of our cause.

But does our philosophical front resemble a real front? It resembles
rather a stagnant creek, or a bivouac far from the battlefield. The
field has not yet been conquered, for the most part contact with the
enemy has not been established, there is no reconnaissance, the weapons
are rusting, the soldiers are fighting at their own risk and peril;
while the commanders are either intoxicated with past victories, or are
debating whether they have sufficient forces for an offensive or should
ask for aid from the outside, or are discussing to what extent
consciousness can lag behind daily life without appearing to lag too
far.

At the same time our Party urgently needs an upswing of
philosophical work. The rapid changes which every new day brings into
our socialist life are not generalised by our philosophers, not
illuminated from the viewpoint of Marxist dialectics. This only renders
more difficult the conditions for the further development of
philosophical science. As a result, the development of philosophical
thought proceeds to a considerable extent apart from our professional
philosophers. This is entirely impermissible.

The cause for the lag on the philosophical front is not, of course,
connected with any objective conditions. The objective conditions are
more favourable than ever. The material awaiting scientific analysis
and generalisation is unlimited. The causes for the lag on the
philosophical front must be sought in the subjective sphere. These
causes are basically the same as those disclosed by the Central
Committee in analysing the lag in other sectors of the ideological
front.

As you will remember, the decisions of the Central Committee on
ideological problems were directed against formalist and apolitical
attitudes in literature and art, against bowing before foreign
influences and for militant Bolshevik partisanship in literature and
art. It is known that many groups of workers on our ideological front
have already drawn proper conclusions from the decisions of the Central
Committee and have achieved considerable successes along these lines.

But our philosophers have lagged behind. Apparently they have not
taken note of the absence of principle and idea-content in
philosophical work, of the neglect of present-day themes, the existence
of servility and fawning before bourgeois philosophy. Apparently they
believe that a turn on the ideological front does not concern them. It
is clear now that the turn is necessary.

A considerable share of responsibility for the fact that the
philosophical front does not stand in the first ranks of our
ideological work rests, unfortunately, upon Comrade Alexandrov. He does
not possess, unfortunately, the ability for sharply critical disclosure
of the weaknesses of his own work. He evidently overestimates his own
powers and does not rely on the experience and knowledge of the
collective body of philosophers. Moreover, he relies too much in his
work on a narrow circle of intimate collaborators and admirers.
Philosophical activity has somehow been monopolised by a small group of
philosophers, while a larger number, especially in the provinces, have
not been brought into leading work.

It is clear that the creation of such a work as a textbook on the
history of philosophy is beyond the capacity of one man and that
Comrade Alexandrov from the very beginning should have drawn upon a
wide circle of authors – dialectical materialists, historical
materialists, historians, natural scientists, and economists. In thus
failing to rely upon a large group of competent people, Comrade
Alexandrov chose an incorrect method of preparing his book.

This fault must be corrected. Philosophical knowledge naturally is
the property of the whole collective body of Soviet philosophers. The
method of drawing in a large number of authors is now being applied to
the editing of the textbook on political economy which should be ready
in the near future. Into this work there have been drawn wide circles,
not only of economists, but also of historians and philosophers. Such a
method of creative work is the most reliable.

This implies also another idea – that of uniting the efforts of
ideological workers in various fields, who at present have insufficient
contact with each other, for the solution of large problems of general
scientific significance. Thus we secure reciprocal activity among the
workers in various branches of ideology and are assured that we will
advance, not helter-skelter, but in an organised and unified manner,
and consequently with the greatest guarantee of success.

Criticism and Self-Criticism – The Special Form
of Struggle Between the Old and the New

What are the roots of the subjective errors of a number of leading
workers on the philosophical front? Why did the representatives of the
older generation of philosophers in the course of the discussion justly
reproach some of the young philosophers for their premature senility,
for their lack of militant tone, of combativeness? Obviously, there can
be only one answer to this question – insufficient knowledge of the
foundations of Marxism-Leninism and the presence of remnants of the
influence of bourgeois ideology.

This expresses itself also in the fact that many of our workers
still do not understand that Marxism-Leninism is a living, creative
theory, continuously developing, continuously enriching itself on the
basis of the experience of socialist construction and the achievements
of contemporary natural science. Such underestimation of this living
revolutionary aspect of our theory cannot but lead to the abasement of
philosophy and its role.

It is precisely in this lack of militancy and fighting spirit that
we must look for the reasons some of our philosophers fear to apply
themselves to new problems – to present-day questions, to the solution
of problems which are daily posed by practice, and for which philosophy
must provide an answer. It is time to advance more courageously the
theory of Soviet society, of the Soviet state, of contemporary natural
science, of ethics and aesthetics. It is necessary to put an end to a
cowardice alien to Bolshevism. To permit stagnation in the development
of theory means to dry up our philosophy, to deprive it of its most
valuable feature – its capacity for development, and to transform it
into a dead and barren dogma.

The question of Bolshevik criticism and self-criticism is for our
philosophers not only a practical but a profoundly theoretical matter.

Since the inner content of the process of development is the
struggle of opposites, as dialectics teach us, the struggle between the
old and the new, between the dying and the rising, between the decaying
and the developing, our Soviet philosophy must show how this law of
dialectics operates in conditions of socialist society and wherein lie
the specific characteristics of its operation. We know that in a
society divided into classes the operation of this law is different
from its operation in our Soviet society. Here is a broad field for
scientific investigation, and none of our philosophers has cultivated
that field. This notwithstanding the fact that our Party long ago
discovered and placed at the service of socialism that particular form
of revealing and overcoming the contradictions of socialist society
(such contradictions exist and philosophy cannot avoid dealing with
them) – that particular form of struggle between the old and the new,
between the dying and the rising, in our Soviet society, which is known
as criticism and self-criticism.

In our Soviet society, where antagonistic classes have been
eliminated, the struggle between the old and the new, and consequently
the development from the lower to the higher, proceeds not in the form
of struggle between antagonistic classes and of cataclysms, as is the
case under capitalism, but in the form of criticism and self criticism,
which is the real motive force of our development, a powerful
instrument in the hands of the Party. This is incontestably a new form
of movement, a new type of development, a new dialectical law.

Marx stated that earlier philosophers only explained the world,
while the task today is to change the world. We have changed the old
world and built a new one, but our philosophers, unfortunately, do not
adequately explain this new world, nor do they adequately participate
in transforming it. In the discussion there were several attempts, as
it were, “theoretically” to explain the causes of that lag. It was
stated, for instance, that the philosophers worked too long as
commentators, and for this reason did not pass in due time to original
monographs. This explanation may sound well, but it is not convincing.
Of course, the philosophers must now place creative work in the
forefront, but that does not mean that the work of commentary, or
rather of popularisation, should be given up. Our people need it just
as much.

The Corrupt Ideology of the Bourgeoisie

We must now quickly make up for lost time. Problems do not wait. The
brilliant victory of socialism, achieved in the Great Patriotic War,
which was at the same time a brilliant victory for Marxism, sticks in
the throat of the imperialists.

Today the centre of the struggle against Marxism has shifted to
America and Britain. All the forces of obscurantism and reaction have
today been placed at the service of the struggle against Marxism.
Brought out anew and placed at the service of bourgeois philosophy are
the instruments of atom-dollar democracy, the outworn armour of
obscurantism and clericalism: the Vatican and racist theory, rabid
nationalism and decayed idealist philosophy, the mercenary yellow press
and depraved bourgeois art.

But apparently all these are not enough. Today, under the banner of
“ideological” struggle against Marxism, large reserves are being
mobilised. Gangsters, pimps, spies and criminal elements are recruited.

Let me take, at random, a recent example. As was reported a few days
ago in Izvestia, the journal LesTemps Modernes,
edited by the existentialist, Sartre, lauds as some new revelation a
book by the writer Jean Genet, The Diary of a Thief,
which opens with the words: “Treason, theft and homosexuality – these
will be my key topics. There exists an organic connection between my
taste for treason, the occupation of the thief, and my amorous
adventures.” The author manifestly knows his business. The plays of the
Jean Genet are presented with much glitter on the Parisian stage and
Jean Genet himself is showered with invitations to visit America. Such
is the “last word” of bourgeois culture.

We know from the experience of our victory over fascism into what a
blind alley idealist philosophy has led whole nations. Now it appears
in its new, repulsively ugly character which reflects the whole depth,
baseness and loathsomeness of the decay of the bourgeoisie. Pimps and
depraved criminals as philosophers – this is indeed the limit of decay
and ruin. Nevertheless, these forces still have life, are still capable
of poisoning the consciousness of the masses.

Contemporary bourgeois science supplies clericalism and fideism with
new arguments which must be mercilessly exposed. We can take as an
example the English astronomer Eddington’s theory of the physical
constants of the universe, which leads directly to the Pythagorean
mysticism of numbers which, from mathematical formulae, deduces such
“essential constants” as the apocalyptic number 666, etc. Many
followers of Einstein, in their failure to understand the dialectical
process of knowledge, the relationship of absolute and relative truth,
transpose the results of the study of the laws of motion of the finite,
limited sphere of the universe to the whole infinite universe and
arrive at the idea of the finite nature of the world, its limitedness
in time and space. The astronomer Milne has even “calculated” that the
world was created 2 billion years ago. It would probably be correct to
apply to those English scientists the words of their great countryman,
the philosopher Bacon, about those who turn the impotence of their
science into a libel against nature.

In like measure, the Kantian subterfuges of contemporary bourgeois
atomic physicists lead them to deductions of the “free will” of the
electron and to attempts to represent matter as only some combination
of waves and other such nonsense.

Here is a colossal field of activity for our philosophers, who
should analyse and generalise the results of contemporary natural
science, remembering the advice of Engels that materialism “with each
epoch-making discovery, even in the sphere of natural science... has to
change its form….” (Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p.
36)

Upon whom, if not upon us – the land, of victorious Marxism and its
philosophers – devolves the task of heading the struggle against
corrupt and base bourgeois ideology? Who if not we should strike
crushing blows against it?

The Triumph of Marxism

From the ashes of the war have arisen the new democracies and the
national liberation movement of the colonial peoples. Socialism is on
the agenda in the life of the peoples. Who, if not we – the land of
victorious socialism and its philosophers – should help our friends and
brothers beyond our borders to illuminate their struggle for a new
society with the light of scientific socialist understanding? Who if
not we should enlighten them with the ideological weapon of Marxism?

In our country the vast expansion of socialist economy and culture
is in progress. The steadfast growth of the socialist understanding of
the masses makes ever greater demands upon our ideological work. What
is taking place is a broad assault upon the vestiges of capitalism in
the consciousness of the people. Who but our philosophers should head
the ranks of the workers on the ideological front, applying in full
measure the Marxist theory of knowledge in generalising the vast
experience of socialist construction and in solving the new tasks of
socialism?

In the face of these great tasks one might ask: Are our philosophers
capable of undertaking these new obligations? Is there enough powder in
our philosophical powder-horns? Has our philosophical power weakened?
Are our philosophical cadres capable, with their own inner strength, of
overcoming the defects of their development and reconstructing their
work anew?

There can be but one answer to this question. The philosophical
discussion has shown that we have these forces, that they are by no
means small, they are capable of exposing their own errors in order to
overcome them. We need only more confidence in our forces, more testing
of our forces in active battles, in posing and solving burning
present-day problems. It is time to put an end to the non-militant
tempo of our work, to shake off the old Adam and to begin to work as
Marx, Engels and Lenin worked, as Stalin works.

Comrades, as you may remember Engels in the past greeted the
appearance of a Marxist pamphlet in 2,000 or 3,000 copies and
characterised this as a great political event of vast significance.
From such a fact, insignificant by our standards, Engels drew the
conclusion that Marxist philosophy had taken deep roots in the working
class. What are we to say of the penetration of Marxist philosophy into
broad strata of our people; what would Marx and Engels have said if
they knew that in our country philosophical works are distributed among
the people in tens of millions of copies? This is a real triumph of
Marxism, and it is a living testimony to the fact that the great
teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin have become in our land the
teaching of the entire people. On this foundation, which has no equal
in the world, our philosophy should flourish. May you be worthy of our
epoch, the epoch of Lenin and Stalin, the epoch of our people, our
victorious people.